Fifty German masterpieces in Israel

 

“Twilight over Berlin”: The Israel Museum shows works from Neue Nationalgalerie.

 

Three women and two men sit frozen in melancholic poses around a long table, in front of a precise topographical view of Potsdam. The sky is overcast. Lotte Laserstein painted the oil canvas “Abend über Potsdam” in 1930. Today, it certainly strikes one as an awful premonition. Shortly afterwards the Nazis put an end to the career of the promising artist owing to her Jewish origins. In 1937, she emigrated to Sweden, where she stayed, even after the end of the war. Acquired just a few years ago by Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie”, Abend über Potsdam” has now inspired an extraordinary exhibition in Jerusalem entitled “Twilight over Berlin: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie, 1905–1945”. To mark the 50th anniversary of The Israel Museum and 50 years of German-Israeli diplomatic relations 50 masterpieces from the German avant-garde of that period are on display. In addition to numerous private sponsors Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport and the German Federal Foreign Office are supporting the presentation.

 

Initially, the title was to be translated into Hebrew as “Sunset Over Berlin” but the organisers considered this “too depressing and too romanticizing” recalls the curator Adina Kamien. They agreed on “Leila jored al Berlin” – Twilight over Berlin. Visitors can enjoy a general artistic overview of the first half of the 20th century, shaped by World War I, the Roaring Twenties of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazis up until the caesura the Second World War created. On display are works by important German expressionists including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, together with innovative artists from the days of the Weimar Republic such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

 

Many of the works were part of the 1937 travelling propaganda exhibition on “degenerate art” that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels initiated parallel to the “Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung” (Great German Art Exhibition), which was devoted to “National Art”. The representatives of the avant-garde were denounced as “degenerate”, “leftist”, “Marxist” , “mentally ill” and “Jewish”. The fact that expressionist painter Nolde – who joined the Nazis in Schleswig-Holstein in 1920 – was amongst those denounced only serves to show how complex the topic is, curator Kamien explains. The Nazis’ inconsistency even resulted in some artists such as Rudolf Belling being shown in both exhibitions. The catalogue of the exhibition at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem documents how Propaganda Minister Goebbels stood in front of artworks, which had anti-Semitic slogans from “Mein Kampf” written across them. For instance, the line scrawled across the painting “The Skat Players” by Otto Dix, who incidentally was not a Jew, reads: “Der Jude verfälscht die deutsche Kunst”, or “The Jew falsifies German art”.

A fair number of works are characterised by the trauma of the First World War – with images of injured men wearing prosthetic limbs, of loneliness, powerlessness and the premonition that something awful is about to happen. George Grosz’ work “Pillars of Society” shows four allegorical figures of society against a backdrop of burning houses signalizing the disintegration of the Weimar Republic. The spectrum on show is wide, ranging from the Expressionism of artists who were members of the “Brücke” movement through the social critics of Dadaism and New Objectivity to images of despair in the face of the unstoppable rise of National Socialism.

 

The exhibition’s “poster girl” – “Sonja” by Christian Schad – also stands for the complexity of the show, Adina Kamien emphasises. One of the champions of New Objectivity, Schad was known for his insightful portraits depicting the social milieu of the 1920s. In the form of “Sonja” he presents an androgynous female in fashionable clothes smoking a Camel cigarette  – attributes of the independent “new woman”. Since Schad’s artistic techniques masked his radicalism the Nazis did not denounce him. His work was even shown in the “Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung” in Munich, which would, however, damage his reputation for years after the war.

 

The fact that “Sonja” marks the show’s start and also adorns the invitations can be attributed to the desire to “begin with something hopeful” explains Kamien. Precisely today, when so many Israelis are travelling to Berlin in search of traces of the Roaring Twenties. To create the right mood visitors can watch an atmospheric film from 1927: Walther Ruttmann’s “Symphony of a Metropolis”, which shows everyday life in Berlin. The four sections of the presentation variously highlight Expressionism, the Weimar Republic, the Bauhaus and, finally, Politics and Trauma.

Kamien says it was not easy to select the 50 works. She had been keen to strike a balance between the “blockbusters” and less well-known paintings (such as that by Communist artist Karl Hofer), some of which survived in east German museums. She found it moving and a diplomatic gesture of sorts to bring art that had once been denounced as “degenerate” to Israel today.

 

Back then, many other artists who had, like seismographs, recorded the impending political earthquake left Germany. They formed an avant-garde Diaspora, which headed for Palestine before the birth of the State of Israel. James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum, remarks how in the 1930s these new immigrants from Germany developed an artistic idiom and practice that would strongly influence many aspects of Israel’s modern culture. “The great works of German Modernism that are now being presented could not better illustrate the victory of the aesthetic legacy of Modernism over suppression and persecution,” argues Snyder. This aesthetic helped found a totally different culture and, having been almost extinguished, it yet represented the start of a new era. “What is critical here is context: You have this tiny country that is amazingly strongly anchored in history,” remarks Snyder. The Director of the Israel Museum hopes this exhibition will also help foster an appreciation for the origins of the visual culture of the modern state of Israel.

    

www.imj.org.il

    

Twilight over Berlin: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie, 1905-1945

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Rupin Boulevard

    

until 15 January 2016

 

Sun, Mon, and Thur

10 am - 5 pm   

 

Tues

4  pm  - 9 pm 

 

Fri and Holiday Eves

10 am - 2 pm

 

 

Sat and Holidays

10 am - 5 pm