Audioguides at the centers can be hit or miss. It can be plodding, patronizing or somehow making the material before it becomes dull. I would recommend the one narrated by John Stamos in Graceland, although it is forced, and the one at the Neue Galerie in New York. The voice of the tour of the last collection of pre-1945 art from Germany and Austria is none other than Ronald Lauder, the man who collected it. As he says on tour, he has three favorite levels of art: “oh,” “oh my” and “oh my god.” You only collect the last one.
There was much to be impressed by coming out of the region at the time, which is the subject of “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Masterpieces from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin,” a new exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The exhibition includes more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the national museum's collection of 20th-century modern art and places special emphasis on the interaction between art and politics during these difficult decades in Germany. And there's still plenty of “oh my god” to enjoy if you're tired of the latest trend of political art interpretation.
Take Curt Querner's Self Portrait with Stinging Nettle (1933), in which a scowling artist holds a poisonous plant between two pinched fingers. Indeed, there is a simple analogy there for the threat of National Socialism. Querner was a committed Communist who responded to a Party meeting at a bowling alley in Dresden on January 25, 1933, which ended in a shootout with the police, leaving nine of his comrades dead and 11 seriously wounded. But it would be a mistake to ignore the painting aspects of this work. Querner was a student of the great Otto Dix and this work shares his talent for portraying strange but deeply sympathetic faces. Her hands are in a strange but defiant position and her clothes may not fit but there's no doubting how she feels. Behind him the door opens onto a roof—actually the roof of his parents' house in the village of Börnchen, where the portrait was painted—which is as vague as his gaze is sharp, lending to the precise fear of the New Purpose movement.
George Grosz was an artist who bounced between styles, including New Objectivity, and his own Pillars of Society (1926) is a good example of this sampling. The title is borrowed from Henrik Ibsen's 1877 and very funny play, where all the liberals of Weimar gather in a bar to vent their various frustrations. In the foreground sits an earless judge with a beer, his head cut open to reveal the wonderful dreams of his horse days. Behind him is a barroom football player with a joint scar and a swastika on his tie riding a shotgun. Next to the press officer—bearing the features of newspaper tycoon Alfred Hugenberg—he wears a hat chamber pot and offers a blood-stained palm of peace, while the brains of a parliamentarian protrude from his exposed skull. Raising the rear, a military chaplain preaches with outstretched arms above the animated atrocities of the Reichswehr. What unites them is the desire for blood, which in times like ours is monolithic. Grosz gives their unique motivations a terrifying texture.
In retrospect it is easier to admire paint than politics. Max Pechstein's Sitting Girl (1910) shows a woman with a come-hither look and an exterior floor that borrows a lot from Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin but adds a German sense of style four decades before the artist's country tried to conquer France a second time. His skin offers more color texture than other professionals could use, and it's a very clever image. She may be a whore, but her heavy makeup meets her face in a way that seems to question whether the border between real and imagined is necessary—which is the same thing, as Pechstein created this fascinating adult figure from the drawings of a nine-year-old neighborhood girl named Fränzi Fehrmann, and commissioned several artists from Brücke. The myth of the sail is a myth; the studio's realities are grim and have generated their own debate since Fehrmann's discovery in the 1990s. The catalog notes that the painting was later included in a collage comparing Expressionism with Communism by the Nazi writer Wolfgang Willrich, in his 1937 book. Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Cleansing of the Temple of Art). This period has a lot to teach us, especially when it comes to the bad mixing of art and politics.
“Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin” is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through July 19, 2026.
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