Last Friday the Hood Museum of Art opened an exciting new exhibit in its Jaffe-Hall galleries. Although small in number, the works in "Stark Impressions: Prints in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933" are each big in impact; grouped together, they brilliantly portray life in the dark period of interwar Europe.
The exhibit's designers made an interesting choice in the organization of the works. Rather than lumping all of the artists represented into one stylistic group like Expressionism, they organized the works into seven topical subheadings: "War, Revolution and Counter-Revolution," "The City," "Women, Love and Sexuality," "Fantasy and Abstraction," "The Struggle for Existence," "The New Religion" and "The New Humanity." The headings work well for the most part, but a few works that would be better presented within a group are left to stand on their own.
"The diversity of the exhibit allows it to include other little-known artists who fall through the cracks of art history," said Reinhold Heller, a professor of art history and Germanic languages at the University of Chicago, in his lecture titled "Art, As if the Future of the World Depended on It," which opened the show Friday.
Although many of "Stark Impressions'" artists may not be household names in this country, they deserve to be. Virtually all of the works displayed in the gallery - and most of them are simple woodcuts, etchings or lithographs in black and white - leap off the walls with the severity of their message.
The Weimar era was a period of drastic change and terrible suffering for the German people, and the pieces shown display how the artists of the period dealt with the harsh realities of modern life. Prints, which can be reproduced yet remain original works of art, were popular in the period because of their general accessibility; but while the methods of printmaking might be seen as limiting by some artists, this group let the medium become a part of the message.
Whether it is the heavy lines of Karl Shmidt Rutloff's work, "Christ," which is thickly inscribed with the words, "In 1928 Christ did not appear to you" or the fantastically simple drypoint etching of Paul Klee's "Why is He Running;" whether it is the bright primary colors of Vassily Kandinsky's lithograph from the "Small Worlds" series or the black background of Kathe Kollwitz's woodcuts, the lines and shapes of printing help describe the artists' worlds.
But these artists did not set out merely to observe their era - they meant to change it. They did this by cleverly juxtaposing the lives of fat cats and paupers, as in George Grosz's cutting caricatures. Grosz minced neither words nor pictures: a sketch of a thick-jawed businessman with a diamond tiepin and a fistful of money glaring at starving people is deftly titled "Where I Rule Things Are Going to Become So Bad That People Will Think Potatoes and Thin Beer Are a Holiday Treat; and Woe to Anyone With Full Ruddy Cheeks That I Happen to See! The Paleness of Poverty and the Servility of Fear Are the Colors I Prefer, and in This Livery I Intend to Clothe You All!"
Artists tried to change their era with brutal descriptions of war, as in Otto Dix's ghostly portfolio expressing his own experiences in World War I. They also used straightforward depictions of the military's destruction of left wing protesters and heart-wrenching images of hunger, venereal disease, plague and the death of women and children, such as Kollwitz's delicate lithograph, "Death Seizes a Woman."
Not all of the works are depressing or violent - there are some tender portrayals of the good things left in people's lives and some prints that promise a new utopia in the future. Still, the most powerful works are those that show the artist trying to come to grips with his or her era, a battle that generally, like the exhibit, comes to no definite conclusion. As Heller explains in his lecture, art in the Weimar era might have been summed up in Hans Grundig's 1932 print, "Suicide is No Escape! Join the KPD! [German Communist Party]," where dreams of Communism's ability to reject Naziism and bring forth a utopian society contrasted starkly with the realities of life.
"Stark Impressions" opened Apr. 9 and continues until June 26.
