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I pass on the advice of the Metropolitan Museum that parents may wish to keep their children away from this exhibition, given its graphic depictions of prostitutes, pimps and the war-wounded.
German painters of the '20s, like Otto Dix, took special pleasure in depicting the zigzag of veins in the foreheads of their victims - that is, their sitters. Hands tend to be outsized, arthritic. Expressions veer from malevolent to foolish.
What is going on here? The artists included here, among them George Grosz, Max Beckman and Karl Hubbuch, were part of the Neue Sachlichkeit - New Objectivity - movement. They belonged to that generation of artists who came of age in the ill-fated Weimar Republic, which emerged after Germany's defeat in WWI and ended with the rise of Hitler. In the postwar upheaval, all of the cultural assumptions of the previous generation were called into question. The ensuing art resurrected medieval satire, without the solace of religion or the promise of salvation.
But if that explains why the painters painted as they did, it does not explain why there sitters submitted to such indignities.
One suspects that, when all is said, there is a complicit wink between artist and sitter. Things are awful, they seem to say, but they are not as bad as all that. And in any case, the art is exceedingly good.
GLITTER AND DOOM: GERMAN PORTRAITS FROM THE 1920'sMetropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street; (212) 535-7710.
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