Three men sit in a cafe' playing cards. One has lost an ear and an eye; deep wounds disfigure his face, drawing his lips up into a permanent smirk. His left hand is a crude wooden prosthesis, while his right hand resembles a transplanted foot. Next to him sits a man who's lost his jaw, a good portion of his head, and both hands, forcing him to hold the cards under his teeth. The third man has an artificial jaw and hand, but no nose, and wears an iron cross-for military valor-on his jacket.
All three are nattily dressed, but below the waist nothing survives except for a leg stump in one and a phallus in another. This may be man's condition, but is also the condition in which he begets the next generation. The painting, Otto Dix's Skat Players (Die Skatspieler) of 1920, is a brutal indictment of war, painted in a willfully distorted style immediately after World War One. Bitter ironies pile up.
The man to the right, actually the artist's self-portrait, holds up a card bearing the legend "Feinste Doppelbilder-Karte"-literally "highest-quality cards with double images," but figuratively a commentary on the two-faced men, both victims and perpetrators. The most sociable game, reminiscent of Cézanne's wistful depiction of the same topic, becomes a paean to the destruction of society. The Nazis hated the picture and banned it, along with other examples of "degenerate art" in this show, entitled Arcadia and the Metropolis. It runs through June 7th at the Neue Galerie in New York City, located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East Eighty-sixth Street.
All of the paintings are on loan from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and many have never left Germany before. Artfully displayed against the most serene blue-gray walls, the exhibition bursts with disturbing images by Otto Dix and his contemporaries, including Georg Grosz, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. On the walls are landscapes, portraits, posters, scenes from everyday life, and other images that round out a portrait of German modernism in the years between World War One and the rise of Hitler.
Despite the remarkable variety in style, the artists share common ground in Expressionism, hence the crude impasto, collapsing space, ugly colors, and ungainly bodies. Historically, this kind of abstraction, or boiling down to essentials, can be traced back to Post-Impressionism (hence the strong colors and prominent outlines), but the elegant and rarefied world of French art lay well outside their interests. What these painters aimed for instead was a rawness and intensity that owed as much to recent developments across the Rhine as it did to native German art, especially such sixteenth-century masters as Matthias Grünewald, whose rhetoric of the grotesque opened up extremes of emotion usually excluded from "nobler" art. So the paintings are, at one and the same time, resolutely modern and profoundly art-historical. Anyone looking for the beautiful in this show will be sadly disappointed, but if you look for outrage, fear, and despair as the Weimar Republic crumbled with the outset of fascism, this show offers a rich if sobering lesson.
