Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910 to 1945 (MIA)

It's a powerful testament to the excellence of art collections in Minnesota that the two indisputable stars of the current show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts are both from museums in this state:  these paintings are Franz Marc's "Blue Horses" from the Walker Art Center and Max Beckmann's "Actors" which is part of the permanent collection of the MIA.  "The Blue Horses" is a thousand watt acetylene torch of a painting -- you can see it through open doors three galleries away; no Virgin Mary was ever arrayed in such splendor as Marc's large, nobly fierce horses; indeed, it seems that you can see the thing through the walls if your imagination is strong enough.  Beckmann's late triptych, "Actors" is a magisterial work, endlessly provocative if, I think, more than a bit muddle-headed -- the huge painting's larger than life-size figures are compressed into an allegorical frieze:  the draftsmanship and design of the three conjoined canvases is astonishing as is the exuberance of the painting and facture.  You can stand in front of this triptych for an hour and not plumb its depths.  (It's part of the permanent collection at the MIA).  The core paintings in the show are from the famously austere (architecturally) Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, a structure that hides underneath the edge of Potsdam Plaza, concealed beneath a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe glass pavilion that looks like a particularly rigorous enclosed bus shelter..  There are many splendid things in the exhibit but the best paintings are from Minneapolis museums.  

After the obligatory and doleful time-lines displayed outside the galleries, the show opens with a small annex, a collection of about a dozen works exemplifying German Expressionism -- these are small, brilliantly vivid, canvases that seem somewhat set apart from the balance of the large galleries; it's as if the exhibitors think Expressionism is a bit beside the point with regard to what follows -- this misconstrues the central importance of the movement in the art that succeeded it, the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the following gallery.  After the first big gallery, the show is designed along thematic lines:  there are rooms displaying art connected to the International Avant Garde, abstraction (with many Kandinsky paintings including another transitional canvas between figurative and abstract that is part of the MIA collection as well), politics, war and a final valedictory gallery entitled "Before and After" -- this room collects thoughts, as it were, with regard to the significance of the Hitler period in German art.  The arc of the exhibition is exemplified by two paintings both by Konrad Felixmueller -- at the very outset of the show, we see the hideous, mask-like and wildly agitated face of Otto Ruehl, a German Communist, haranguing a crowd of workers; Felixmueller's work was declared Entartete ("Degenerate") by the Nazi regime and he destroyed all of his objectionable work except the portrait of the insanely agitated Ruehl in full spate.  After the war, Felixmueller recreated the entire painting that he had burned with the exception of the face, and this canvas is the last picture in the show -- I think it is meant to show some kind of reparation after the years of atrocity.  There is nothing calming about this painting, however, and, although Felixmueller was a man of the Left, the painting of the Ruehl as a wild-eyed fanatic is by no means complimentary to the man -- in fact, the picture suggests the problem with German interwar politics:  extremism in which the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.  The same effect arises from a work by Otto Dix showing the German art dealer Alfred Flechtheim -- Dix's attitude to his subject seems highly problematic:  the painting is an anti-Semitic cartoon, albeit unforgettably vivid.   Flechtheim is painted with claws for hands, avaricious and grasping, and he looks monstrous with a small head and a huge hooked nose -- I don't know whether Dix intended an anti-Semitic caricature or whether Flechtheim just looked like this, his features heightened and exaggerated according to Expressionistic norms of representation.  But the image is disturbing.  (I'm not alone in my distress, according to the Catalog, Flechtheim had to flee to England where he died in poverty; no one would exhibit the picture in post-war Germany and so Dix died with it in his personal collection.)  

The Expressionist movement (there is no reference in the show to DADA, an equally influential art avant-garde that greatly influenced the painters of the New Objectivity) is represented by Kirchner, Pechstein, and Nolde among others.  Pechstein's livid portrait of a young girl is very impressive, showing that the Expressionists could create beauty in spite of themselves.  Emil Nolde has two paintings in the show and he seems to be the most accomplished of the Expressionists on display -- there are astonishing paintings of Jesus with the sinner Mary Magdalene (part of violent cycle of paintings on the subject, erotic with smeared, glandular streaks of color) as well as a wonderful picture of the Pentecost with the disciples like African totems, each with a little cone of flame on their mask-like heads.  New Objectivity is represented largely by portraits, most of which are extremely accomplished.  Christian Schad's 1928 "Sonja" is the mascot for the show and, indeed, a great painting depicting a beautiful,but beleagured-looking "modern woman".  Schad is technically accomplished to an alarming degree and a  very interesting artist not well-known in this country -- his important works are mostly portraits and images of himself painted in the candid, but self-aggrandizing style of Albrecht Duerer (he was apparently very handsome).  When I was in Aschaffenburg a suburb of Frankfurt that stands in relation to the metropolis as Northfield is to Minneapolis, I had a chance to tour Schad's studio and home -- he moved to Aschaffenburg after the War.  I didn't know anything about the artist and so, I looked at other things first (mostly a garishly restored Cranach altar piece) and, when I reached the door to the Schad gallery, the place was closed.  I regret not learning more about Schad when I had the opportunity.

As you might expect, the show becomes increasingly grim with, however, some bright highlights -- there are two resplendent and jewel-like paintings by Paul Klee that occupy an abstract and glittering space that is outside of history and time. A side gallery exhibits 17 or 18 works by the great Kaethe Kollwitz -- these include the supremely moving sculpture "Tower of Women", showing burly matrons forming a protective circle around their children.  As if in riposte to the Kollwitz sculpture, there is Barlach's famous "The Avenger", a bronze that depicts a berserker with a saber lunging blindly forward -- Barlach made the bronze before he went away to World War One; when he returned, the sculpture had a different meaning to him -- it no longer expressed enthusiasm at the war but  the frenzied insanity of combat.  A large monochrome triptych shows people cowering in a subway bomb shelter -- it looks like a Beckmann painting without the bright colors of indescribeable hue and the verve of his expressive brushwork.  Two rather dour portraits flank another Beckmann masterpiece, his Weimar era portrait of the great actor Heinrich George, rehearsing his lines for a performance of Schiller's bellicose Wallenstein while wife and child cower before his fury -- George glowers out at us, wearing a sinister butcher's apron of some kind.  The labels on the wall for, at least, half of the works are melancholy -- the painters were sent to concentration camps, tortured, and killed; in other cases, their paintings were denounced as "degenerate" exposed to ridicule, and, then, deaccessioned to foreign lands.  German history seized a good number of these artists by the throat and destroyed them.  State-sanctioned Hitler period art is limited to a single impressive example -- this is a giant heroic bronze of a nude young man, genitals prominently on display; there's nothing wrong with this figure -- indeed, I thought it had wonderful presence, like an archaic kouros stoic, powerful, and enigmatic.  

(I will note that after perusing the catalog, the array of very fine Kollwitz etchings and woodcuts are from the collection of the MIA as is the splendid "Avenger" by Barlach, a counterpart to the great "Angel of the Reformation" that stands guard atop a lion outside the museum entrance.)

Upstairs, in the print gallery, you will find a group of hand-colored engravings of Egypt and its antiquities by David Roberts.  The images are fascinating.  Roberts toured Egypt traveling all the way up the Nile to Nubia where he records the appearance of Abu Simbel.  The pictures were published as part of a folio of something like 200 engravings documenting the ruins as they looked around 1840.  This was one of the last books of its kind, this genre of reportage supplanted by photography.  The pictures are all very entertaining -- I particularly liked one of a simoom or dust storm approaching the stoic-looking battered sphinx with the camels of a caravan sprawled out on the sand with their long serpentine necks ducked down to avoid the storm of grit and pebbles about to beset them.

Cobra Woman

 Universal Studios Cobra Woman released during World War Two (1943) sounds like a horror movie, a throwback to the classic monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the werewolf that the company produced during the Depression.  This is misleading.  In fact, the picture is an exotic escapist fantasy, a brightly lit technicolored dream, more akin to The Wizard of Oz or The Thief of Baghdad -- indeed, many of the Moorish-style sets with domes and filigree-covered windows look like they were borrowed from the latter picture.  This is a war-time diversion, brilliantly lit and expensively colored, that also doubles as a rather lurid erotic spectacle.  The picture is extremely entertaining in a garish, hallucinatory way:  every frame of the picture is designed to monopolize your attention -- if things seem to lag, the director Robert Siodmak spices things up with nubile slave girls, human sacrifices, threats of  torture and  an avuncular chimpanzee as jester, ambling around in a weird batik apron and diaper.  The cast  is good for this sort of thing:  Jon Hall plays the love-smitten jungle explorer hero with a big square head and big square jaw and an "aw-shucks" demeanor.  Hall's character, oddly named Ramu, is passive, generally spending his time tied-up in a dungeon or, otherwise, ineffectually mooning over this missing girlfriend.  The girlfriend, indeed, Ramu's fiancee, is the lissome Tollea, played by Maria Montez, as beautiful and remote as a Greek statue or the moon.  Tollea has a twin sister (also Montez of course) who is more lively -- she's the titular cobra woman, the High Priestess of a snake cult on a small island dominated by a smoking and, sometimes, fiery volcano that looks just something contrived for an eighth grade science fair.  The High Priestess is more lively than her sister, a sadist who requires her longsuffering people to hurl themselves into the volcano to preserve her dictatorial rule.  The Cobra Woman's muscle is priest called Martock, who runs around in a brilliant scarlet robe with a hat that looks like an oversized tulip just sprouting from the earth.  (The movie seems to put most of its budget into resplendent costumes:  the Cobra Woman wears a meter-high tiara of coruscating gold and gems -- it looks like a peacock's tail extended over her head -- and her slinky, high-fashion vestments are embroidered with more jewels that glitter against the red fabric.  The women in the Court are all showgirls -- they wear clothing that is so tight-fitting that that they might as well be completely topless.  Although the story takes place in a South Seas jungle, the girls all prance about in high-heels.)  Lon Chaney Jr., who always looks as if he's being tortured, plays the part of a beggar whom we first see with gruesome white eyes -- he can't talk because his tongue has been ripped out.  The beggar, in fact, is an emissary from the old Queen of Snake Island, the mother of Tollea and her evil twin, the High Priestess; the picture is about regime change -- the old Queen Mother wants to install the more humane and reasonable Tollea in the role of High Priestess; the evil twin is a kind of usurper.  When Chaney's enigmatic beggar abducts Tollea and takes her to Snake Island, her aggrieved fiancee Ramu (Jon Hall) pursues her, crossing over to the dangerous island where all strangers are tortured to death.  Accompanying him is Kado, played obsequiously by Sabu, the handsome and loyal jungle boy with his pet chimpanzee named Koko.  On the island, action is non-stop and breathless and the action proceeds on the principle of "one damn thing after another."  A black panther stalks Ramu but the jungle-boy uses a blow-pipe to kill the critter mid-air as it springs from a cliff onto the hero.  The protagonists climb a cliff, nearly falling off and, then, see Tollea with an entourage of Vegas-style show girls bathing in the sacred pond -- Ramu leaps in and Siodmak cuts to underwater shot in which hero and heroine embrace in the turquoise-colored depths.  Ramu is captured by Martock and thrown in a dungeon.  The poor jungle boy gets savagely tortured by being stretched by the tension of a bent tree while his feet are fettered.  ("Take him to the tree of torture!" someone commands.)  The feisty ape frees the jungle boy who is none the worse for wear.  The High Priestess does a cobra dance wiggling around while a gigantic serpent glares at her.  The serpent rests on a sort of silver platter, the kind of thing on which you might be served paela in an expensive Spanish restaurant.  (Siodmak is a product of the German film system -- the dance sequence is indebted to the similarly erotic performance by the robot Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.)  Two-hundred peasants are selected for human sacrifice in the gullet of the volcano which rumbles threateningly.  Ramu escapes from the dungeon and, finally, there's a huge brawl in the ornate cobra temple with the jungle-boy and great White hunter swinging back and forth on conveniently placed ropes tethered to overhead candelabra to lunge onto their enemies while the chimp gloats, turns his lip back over his lower jaw, and pitches pieces of fruit at the combatants.   During this battle royale, the volcano erupts and spews rocks and red hot magma all over the place.  All ends well.  The oppressive reign of the Cobra Woman comes to an end and peace and harmony are restored on the island.  

The dialogue is precious, little chunks of overheated nonsense chanted by the characters:  for example, a villain characterizes the Queen Mother's hopes for the future as "the wild dream of her decaying brain."  During the brawl, the two-hundred human sacrifices are heard climbing the "thousand steps to the volcano's" top, singing their "fire death hymn".  The sacred pond is a round pool in an idyllic forest edged at the far side with a whole flock of flamingos -- the flamingos never move and its obvious that their just lawn ornaments seen from a distance; the filmmakers hope you won't notice but you do and that's part of the charm of this picture.  Similarly, the mise-en-scene alternates shots of a real cobra looking rather timid and beleaguered with a prosthetic creature, probably a puppet, that's twice as large -- again the filmmakers sort of hope that you won't notice the discrepancy but,  of course, you do.  The opening titles assure the viewer that you're in for a good time:  two massive bronze braziers are burning with orange flame -- they produce vertical columns of bright green smoke that flank a huge gilded image of  a cobra about to strike.  

Reputedly, Cobra Woman was Kenneth Anger's favorite film, admired by the director of the libertine The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Lucifer Rising among other pictures.  I should also note that Cobra Woman has a peculiar message or moral:  "Fear has made them (referring to the Snake Islanders) religious fanatics."  Curiously, the picture suggests that the problem on the island is that Martock representing law (secular authority) has got entangled with the religious sect of cobra worship.  This seems a sort of "Why we Fight" aspect to the film. In an oblique way, the film seems to be a part of the war effort.