Graphic Expressionism Portland show exhibits stark German reaction to war, life

Riding an escalator into a subterranean art gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, I had a revelation about my German forebears. For years, I was ashamed to mention my ethnic background because of World War II, even though I had no evidence that my relatives did or did not participate in the Holocaust. I didn’t even know if I still had relatives in Germany. Nevertheless, I told people I was French, Irish, a little Italian, but never German.

That day in Washington, however, I came face to face with a side of Germany I hadn’t previously considered – its artists. The show I visited was about German Expressionism, an avant-garde movement that flourished during the first part of the 20th century. The exhibition “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” also addressed the historical realities of the period, and, descending on the escalator, I passed through a photo gallery of poster-size portraits of artists. Many of their works had been included in the original “Entartete Kunst” – or “Degenerate Art” – staged by Hitler in Munich in 1937. To the Fuehrer’s neoclassical taste, these paintings were grotesque and repugnant. The show was meant to deride the artists and the art, much of which he then torched two years later in Berlin. While the German masses understood that these pieces were to be reviled, more than three million attended the show.

By the time I walked through the Washington show, which included works by Emil Nolde, Kathe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, I was reeling in the German imagination, creativity and talent on display. These artists trusted their souls, they fearlessly believed in the experimental and, as with Gauguin, they embraced Nature in all its expressive and primal potential. But I also felt their beauty, even in the most harrowing pieces.

Did my own German blood propel me to see into these works in a deeper, more personal way? That day, I believed so. And I walked away with a spinning sense of inheritance, one that felt more regenerative than degenerative.

I tell this story by way of introduction to another show “German Expressionist Graphics: The Bradford Collection,” on view through Oct. 24 at the Portland Museum of Art. With 85 works, including woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and drypoint prints, the exhibition provoked me in a similar way as the one in 1991. Many of the same artists are represented. But more important, I entered the museum thinking one thing- that German Expressionism is bold and intriguing – and left thinking another – that art about war, no matter when or where, can be both horrifying and instructive. It also struck me that artists may offer the most enduring depictions of human strife and hypocrisy.

Eva and David Bradford, who have a summer home in Center Lovell and live in Berkeley, Calif., say they are drawn to this often difficult art because it provides a stimulus to learn about history. “The ultimate meaning of this art for us is as a fervent reminder against complacency,” they write in an introductory statement. What could be more timely than graphics that depict gunning soldiers, battlefield scenes, the fat-cat profiteers and the damage to families, morals and quality of life?

There’s more than that to this show, including portraits, landscapes and nudes. But the war theme, given our current international involvements, struck me the most.

The Bradfords began collecting this art in the 1960s, another time of societal upheaval in America. Their collection has grown to more than 150 prints, 50 of which they have donated to the museum with the remainder to follow eventually. Theirs is one of the most significant gifts the museum has ever received. It’s not hard to see why.

The “Degenerate Art” show was mounted in Los Angeles, D.C. and Berlin, and was a landmark scholarly investigation of the material. But the collection was not the very best of the genre. The graphic show in Portland is. This is a gutsy and gritty collection, on view for the first time but indicative of the ongoing place this art will play in Maine’s cultural landscape.

I’m thinking particularly of etchings from Kollwitz’s series “The Peasants’ War.” Certainly her socialist commitments inform these pieces – as in “Outbreak” (1903) in which a single compelling figure, Black Anna, rises powerfully in the foreground to inspire a wave of revolting peasants. In another, “Battlefield” (1907), a shadowy woman, walking among the dead, shines a light onto the face of a corpse. At first, I thought she was looking for loot. Then it seemed clear she was trying to identify her own son. Either way, the etching points to the horrors of war.

It turns out that Kollwitz lost her own son in World War I, which surely informs another of her works “The Widow” (1922-23). In this stark etching, a woman is stretched prostrate on the ground, her baby draped across her chest. If she is a widow, she is also in a frozen paroxysm in death’s pall. With husband and father gone, mother and child are in an emotional rigor mortis. Kollwitz also lost her grandson in World War II.

Others in the show express their social criticism through satire. Dix, Grosz and Beckmann capture that signature German look that is cartoonish while at the same time searingly critical of leadership and the bourgeoisie. Often the political commentary slips into perverse sexual content, pulling back the curtain on the real decadence in Germany. Beckmann’s “Drinking Song,” Dix’s “The Soldier and the Nun,” and Grosz’s “Teutonic Celebration” all leave the viewer with a picture of the corruption in the Weimar Republic. Grosz’s “Sex Murder in the Ackerstrasse” is the most gruesome in its depiction of a beheading – far too close to our own headlines these days.

In a way, however, our own headlines, sadly, add to the power of this show. We are not Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. And we hope we aren’t in the midst of another Holocaust. But we are in dire times, and if these works quiet us or make us restless, then they justify themselves as art.

On the other hand, if you seek beauty, you will also find it in this collection. These are masters and innovators in the graphic arts, after all. As with Picasso, many of these artists broke away from the ordered practices of Western art. They looked toward what they called “the primitive” for portraits of their lovers and family members or selves. “Mary,” by Schmidt-Rottluff, who is well-represented in this collection, uses large blocky hatch marks, and his “By the Nets,” a coastal scene with fishwives, is every bit as lovely in its own way as a Winslow Homer.

The artists in this collection sought to change the world, to shake up the complacency of their communities and demand that the lies and propaganda of the time be viewed in large and insistent terms. Can art change the world? The question is never posed in the exhibition, but it hangs in the air in a stifling, shocking, suggestive way. The final effect: We are all inheritors in this show.