“A brilliant, sinister time..”

...is how the Metropolitan Museum describes Berlin between the two wars in its Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s. The exhibition will run until February 19, 2007. The galleries feature Otto Dix, Christian Schaad, Max Beckman, and George Grosz among others. Dix’s unflattering portraits of the many people who sat for him were so troubling that one of them, Karl Krall donated it to the Nationalegalerie in Berlin within a few months. Dix, himself handsome like some of his sitters, decided however not to view himself with same distorted vision he applied to the world in painting himself!

Part of the exhibition are two rooms of drawings including one which has several works by Dix of war victims and the horrendous mutilations they suffered. The Met provides excellent background on the period and the ravages that frame the context of the art on display. There were one hundred thousand prostitutes often widows and mothers who had to support their families and over one and a half million wounded permanently disabled soldiers returned to Germany after the war. Little wonder then that George Grosz paints himself in the corner of one of his vast paintings as a man with stumps.

Grosz’ and Dix’s engagement with the larger issues of their time is somewhat like Goya’s work after the Napoleonic invasion of France and the brutalities suffered by the population. Goya in his drawings and etchings never hesitated to show, closely and upfront the cruelties and corruptions embedded in our nature and Grosz and Dix don’t either.

Portraits by Christian Schad provide for a welcome breather. While many of these works have been shown previously at the Neue Galerie,New York in 2003 in the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, one or two are fresh. Many of the portraits in the exhibition have common themes and common links but in their actual execution there is a breadth of style that makes this show particularly enjoyable.

Sabine Rewald the curator has done an outstanding job putting the hundred pieces of this show together and one can only hope that she will curate something soon that will bring together art from the 1800s with Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich or Symbolists like Arnold Böcklin.