Audio guides can be hit or miss in establishments. They can be plodding, condescending, or somehow fabricate the material before it becomes boring. I recommend the one narrated by John Stamos at Graceland, though it’s obligatory, and the one at Neue Galerie in New York. The voice of the latest round of pre-1945 art collection from Germany and Austria is none other than that of Ronald Lauder, the man who collected it. As he said on the tour, he has three levels of art that he likes: “Oh,” “Oh my God,” and “Oh my God.” He collects only the last.
There was a lot to admire coming out of the area in that period, which is the subject of “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Artworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin,” a new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The exhibition brings together more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the National Museum of Modern Art’s 20th-century collection, and focuses in particular on the interaction between art and politics during these difficult decades in Germany. And there’s still plenty of “oh my gosh” to enjoy if you’re a little tired of the recent vogue for political interpretations of art.
Take Kurt Kerner Self-portrait with stinging nettle (1933), in which the scowling painter holds the poisonous plant between two pinched fingers. Sure, there’s an easy analogy there to the threat of National Socialism. Koerner was a dedicated communist who responded to a party meeting in a bowling alley in Dresden, on January 25, 1933, which ended in a shootout with the police, killing nine of his comrades and seriously wounding 11 others. But it would be a mistake not to admire the pictorial aspects of this work. Koerner was a student of the great Otto Dix, and this work shares his talent for uncanny yet deeply sympathetic facial expressions. His hands are in a strange but defiant position and his clothes may not be appropriate but there is no doubt about how he feels. Behind him the door opens into an attic—actually the attic of his parents’ house in the village of Bornschen, where the picture was painted—as mysterious as his intense gaze, contributing to the subtle awe of the New Objectivity movement.
George Grosz was an artist who moved between styles, including New Objectivity and his own Pillars of society (1926) is a great example of these specimens. The title is borrowed from Henrik Ibsen’s highly satirical 1877 play, in which all the liberals of Weimar gather in a bar to vent their various frustrations. In the foreground sits an earless judge clutching a beer, his head severed to reveal superficially surreal fantasies of his cavalry days. Behind him is a friend in the bar room with a dueling scar, a swastika on his tie, and riding shotgun. Nearby, the press baron – bearing the visage of newspaper czar Alfred Hugenberg – wears a bowler hat and offers a bloodied palm of peace, while the parliamentarian’s brain literally bubbles from his exposed skull. In the foreground, a military chaplain preaches with outstretched arms over the cartoonish atrocities of the Reichswehr. What unites them is bloodshed, which in moments like ours can feel cohesive. Grosz gives their unique motivations a gruesome texture.
Going back even further, it is easier to admire paint than politics. Max Bechstein Sitting girl (1910) shows a woman with an oncoming gaze and a puffy bottom that borrows heavily from Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin but adds a German sensibility to the style four decades before the painter’s country attempted to invade France for a second time. Her skin provides more color texture than other masters would have used, and it is a less intellectual image. She may be a prostitute, but her intense makeup blends with her face in a way that seems to question whether the boundaries between the real and the imagined are necessary—which is necessary, too, given that Bechstein based this seductive adult persona on sketches of a nine-year-old neighborhood girl named Franzi Ferman, and then posed for several of Brooke’s illustrators. Imagination on canvas is imagination; The studio realities are uglier and have generated their own controversy since Fairman was identified in the 1990s. The catalog notes that the painting later appeared in a collection that equated Expressionism with Communism by Nazi theorist Wolfgang Wellrich, in his 1937 book. Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Cleansing the temple of art). This time period has a lot to teach us, especially when it comes to the hideous mixing of art and politics.
“Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Works of Art from the New National Gallery, Berlin“On display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts until July 19, 2026.
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