ART: Sex and angst and the City
Kirchner at the Royal Academy
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) does not seem to have led a particularly happy life. For nearly ten years, between 1905 and 1915, he worked furiously and productively first in Dresden then in Berlin. The paintings, drawings and woodcut prints he produced during this period still tell recognisable truths about urban life with a nervous energy and spiky candour all their own. Along with Van Gogh and Munch, he had more or less invented Expressionism — one of modernism's more elastic and enduring visual dialects. The onset of the Great War, however, saw Kirchner conscripted into the German army, where alcohol, morphine and possible venereal disease brought on a bad nervous breakdown. In time Kirchner moved to Switzerland but was dogged by paranoia and depression. Discouraged by the rise of National Socialism and the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition, he shot himself at the age of 58.
Kirchner: Expressionism and the City, currently showing at the Royal Academy, celebrates the modernist achievement rather than lamenting the incidental tragedy. The emphasis is all on that triumphant decade of grappling with fin-de-siecle urban experience — of turning the colours of Matisse or Derain to the service of an agenda informed by Nietzsche and Freud. The exhibition is, very obviously, the fruit of personal commitment on the part of the RA's much-maligned director Norman Rosenthal, who knows a considerable amount about German art and is frustrated at the UK's endless tardiness in coming to terms with it. In this frustration he's right, of course. The right exhibition of, say, Manet's attempts to get to grips with the modern metropolis would break box-office records, but finding a London audience for Kirchner requires some heavy-duty persuasion — as, one suspects, did the Beckmann (2002-3) show at Tate Modern, or the RA's own Grosz (1997) and Kandinsky (1999) exhibitions. So what is it about Kirchner, or about German art more generally, that keeps British crowds away?
It is not enough to mention the war(s), as if that were the complete and unproblematic answer to every question involving the word 'Germany', although Germany's bad twentieth century obviously has something to do with it. It is hard, frankly, not to read history from back to front, so that everything — not just Kirchner's green-faced whores and jagged streetscapes, either, but the whole history of German art back through Dürer, Grünwald and Cranach — resolves itself into part of the broader running running commentary on the Nazis and how they did what they did. And here it is not exactly a help that the art of what eventually came to be Germany has always been known in this country more for its emotive, spiritual or even mystical qualities than for the emphasis on formal achievements or overall Apollonian balance that British connoisseurs came to expect from, or at least applaud in French or Italian painting. If there is an art out there that is all about making windows into men's souls, who can blame the casual viewer from looking in?
But then there's a secondary problem, too, which starts out in the depths of art history but seeps into cultural stereotypes far beyond. This is the whole canonical narrative of modernism as once formulated amongst English-speaking people everywhere, not starting with but certainly including Alfred J. Barr, which recounts that the heavy baton of art-historical progress was passed, at some point around the Second World War, from France (where the Impressionists had conveyed it to the post-Impressionists, thence to Cezanne, and thence to Picasso and Matisse) to the United States, with the rest of Europe negotiating a marginal Cold War existence, producing a bit of derivative abstraction here and a bit of eccentric or socialist realism there, but generally not mattering much until 1989 coincided, perhaps too neatly, with the collapse of New York as a hegemonic art-world centre. And while no one really believes this story any more, it remains the story one has to remember not to believe.
So it does not help that Germany spent much of the post-war period largely ignoring the all-American formal debates and instead producing a rich artistic scene that seemed, somehow, almost pathologically obsessed with the whole business of being German — whether this meant the self-mythologizing lard-infused conceptual art of Beuys, the affected detachment of Richter, the purposefully ugly abstractions of Polke or the all-too-specific tangling of the personal with the political as exemplified by Penck, Kiefer and Baselitz. This was dark, difficult, engaged art that refused to find beauty in anything as cheap as pretty colours or elegant forms, and anyway the Anglophone world was as likely to find the messages uncongenial as it was to find the medium downright ugly. All of which is a long way of saying that drawing a line connecting, say, Cranach to Kirchner to Baselitz is not a sure-fire way to draw a crowd — although, not to put too fine a point on it, that perennial crowd-pleaser Van Gogh was no more complicated, troubled or troubling than Kirchner is — nor were his colours any more vivid, surprising or beautiful.
Because that's bound to be one of the great surprises of this magnificent exhibition for anyone — which probably means most of us here in London — who have only seen Kirchner's paintings and drawings one-at-a-time, perhaps only in reproduction and generally in the context of the history of German Expressionism: much of it is extremely happy, apparently carefree, life-affirming stuff. Turn off the hindsight for a moment, and be honest — if you didn't know any better, could you tell from the work in the earlier rooms that this artist (and, if you believe Auden, his entire culture) would, in the next decade or two, be driven mad? I don't think you could, and we need to bring this freshness of vision to Kirchner's account of the city in order to do his own freshness justice.
For while Kirchner's life fell apart after 1915 or so, the decade before had in some ways been a refulgently sunny one. In 1905 Kirchner, still an architecture student in the slightly sleepy if beautiful city of Dresden, joined with friends in setting up a group called Die Künstler-Gruppe Brücke (The Artists' Bridge Group) — one of those all-purpose youth movements dedicated to finding the way to the future, as ever through means including free-ish love, a bit of light substance abuse and a lot of artistic innovation, finished off with a gentle dusting of self-justifying theory. In 2003 we can feel jaded about such things, but there remains every possibility that a century ago they seemed new, exciting and positively engorged with possibility. This is exactly the quality that radiates from many of Kirchner's paintings. Kirchner was a bohemian, living the life that fantasy tends to ascribe to artists, but which they so rarely achieve. In Kirchner's social circle, circus performers and prostitutes mingled with intellectuals and cabaret singers, modelling and messing about and having sex with each other in a casual sort of way; the decoration in the group's communal studio was inspired by African tribal art and oddities found in local markets; in the summer, the group decamped to the Moritzburg lakes outside of Dresden where they removed their clothes in order to swim, enjoy the sun or to rediscover the simple and direct sensibilities of happy savages. In short, it all sounds a bit like the way people of my generation always secretly suspect that the 1960s, which we mostly missed, might have been.
Kirchner, at any rate, seems to have enjoyed it completely — those summer days, the carefree fun and certainly the girls. He drew and painted women endlessly. He painted his girlfriend Dodo, Mimi the exotic dancer, a pair of adolescent sisters named Franzi and Marzella who fell in with his group of friends — painted them clothed or nude, or sometimes a bestockinged or hat-wearing compromise between the two — conveying everything from affectionate camaraderie and aesthetic appreciation to frank lust. The art from this phase of his work is amazing stuff, surging with energy and overflowing with fantastic colour. Kirchner is rightly known for the quality of his drawing, whether with a brush or a pastel crayon or the woodcutter's burin, and that quality is certainly on show at the Royal Academy. He seems to have been ready to sketch anything, to coax a visual rhythm out of the most unlikely subject, and in doing this perfected a jagged, hard yet sometimes sinuous line that was both a signature style and at the same time a language fluid enough to weave together different sorts of realities. For while Kirchner is always remembered — when he is remembered — as a painter of cities, like Manet or Degas or Renoir he lived in a world where much urban spectacle was played out against a backdrop of domesticated nature — green lawns, glimmering lakes, and romanticism's whole heavy heritage of thought about the freedom, the wholesomeness and the sexy semi-danger of the wild.
Later, in 1911, Kirchner and some of his friends moved to Berlin. Here new friendships formed — not least with new girlfriend Erna and her sister Gerda, who appear in several of Kirchner's works — and, perhaps not surprisingly, Die Brücke began its slow and sometimes painful dissolution. Berlin was, at the time, Europe's third biggest city, and growing fast. The works on show at the RA chronicle Kirchner's developing responses to this new environment. The lines grow spikier, the colours more acid and the chromatic contrasts more biting. A painting like Nollendorf Square (1912) is instructive, not least when one stops to think both how near it is to Van Gogh's work (some of which Kirchner knew) but also how far — the kinship evident in those blues and yellows and blacks, the lurching sense of spatial dislocation — the difference evident not only in the sharp hatching lines or the urban context, but perhaps most of all the intangible sense that this movement, this frantic activity is somehow arbitrary, pointless and unredeemable. While Van Gogh quoted Scripture, Kirchner quoted Nietzsche, and Nollendorf Square is the visual corollary of the gulf that separated these two sensitive, intelligent, ultimately suicidal men.
Or is that reading too much back into the images? We try to stop ourselves, but it is harder than it looks, not least when we come to Kirchner's most famous body of work: his Berlin streetscapes, where the city becomes a sort of monstrous jungle inhabited by predatory men and even more predatory prostitutes, more poisonous and merciless than anything nature could have produced. Or does it? He let his girlfriend and her sister pose as whores, and he formed friendships with these women too; we need to remind ourselves that the Manet and Degas also filled their canvasses with evocations of these central modernist stock-figures, who perhaps more obviously than any other group mediated between the naturalness of sexual attraction and the capitalist structures that made the modern city work. So while there is surely more than a little of la belle dame sans merci here, there may also be more admiration, more amusement, more tingling lust than we have been led to expect. One is reminded of Frank Auerbach's response to Walter Sickert's paintings of illicit transactions in Camden bedsits: those stolen glimpses of rounded white limbs in dark rooms have struck others as dank, miserable and even frightening, but for Auerbach they were comforting, welcoming, even erotic. He was sure that these rooms were, in fact, places he'd like to occupy himself. We should try to stretch to that sort of possibility, and not just as an exercise, either. What if this Berlin wasn't a capital of syphilitic whores and shot nerves, too much speed and too much wealth to last for long — what if, before the stormclouds broke, it was wild and fast and fun?
The last works in the RA's exhibition are a handful of pieces — a few self-portraits, and the marvellous cycle of coloured woodcuts which tell the tale of Peter Schlemihl, a man who sold his shadow for a pot of gold — dating from after Kirchner's breakdown. The regimented life of an artilleryman had not suited this habitual free spirit, nor had exile in the garrison-town of Halle. Morphine and drink hadn't helped. Invalided out of near-global conflict, Kirchner ended up in a sanatorium, wrestling with himself. Here the work he created was both genuinely troubled and genuinely powerful, but at the same time one senses the fluency seizing up, the language failing. Afterwards, Kirchner would struggle to find the right subjects, the right method, and would end up betraying modernism in the worst possible way — by the retrograde step, the increased literalism, the harder edges and easier concepts of a late de Chirico — and was punished in the unbearable way modernism always punishes its true inredeemables — by ignoring him. Hence no work in the RA's show after 1919, although he died in 1938. Let us, after all, speak none but good of the dead.
But while we're on that particular subject, it would be good if people stopped insisting (pace the Guardian) that Kirchner was a 'Nazi victim'. He wasn't. Like Walter Benjamin, he was a 'victim' of, if anything, his own afflicted super-consciousness of the world around him, like so many before and since, Nazis notwithstanding. There were plenty who endured worse who lived to see the Nazis receive the catastrophic defeat they so richly deserved; there were others who were not so lucky, and let us not trivialise their murders by pretending that Kirchner was somehow harmed by the Nazis in the same sense that they — by bullet, by gas, by whatever — so clearly and terminally were.
So what is there, ultimately, to be said for Kirchner? Well, plenty of difficult things. As Norman Rosenthal is entirely right to point out, Kirchner's early triumphs came at a time when nationalism perhaps appeared the greatest of the nineteenth century's great ideas. (The fact that every single one of them has gone septic is neither here nor there.) He loved the fact he was German. 'German art has to fly with its own wings,' he wrote to Emile Nolde in 1913. 'We have the duty to separate ourselves from the French — it is time for an independent German art.' Kirchner has ever right to be a central figure of modernism, but those old Germans meant a lot to him. There is a sexy, lithe, fluid woodcut in the exhibition that today looks like a pretty slutty girl in a silly hat, but in another light is pastiche Cranach; Kirchner recognised this ambiguity and loved it. In his spikiness there is a conscious attempt to go for a 'Gothic' handling, rather than a soft lubricious southern one. He loved his angst-ridden existence. He wanted this to happen. The result was something he courted. He loved and wanted German history to work, to build a big sexy bridge across the future, but the future double-crossed him. Let us at least give this technically adept, endlessly young and virile, charismatic exponent of modernism the send-off he deserves by pretending to see all this — cities, women, modernity — as he saw them. Kirchner: Expressionism and the City is a brilliant show, at least for those who are willing to leave some pretty wearisome preconceptions at the door.
Kirchner: Expressionism and the City runs from 28 June - 21 September 2003. Tickets are (by the RA's standards) a minimal £7, with varying concessions.
Bunny Smedley is ERO's arts editor. Despite being a Tory, she was bored rigid by the Impressionists until she read T. J. Clark.
Bunny Smedley, June 30, 2003 05:20 PM