Money makes the world go around...

"Glitter and Doom" at the Metropolitan

by Beth E. Wilson, January 30, 2007

There are only a few weeks left for you to get down to the City to see the Metropolitan Museum's astonishing exhibition "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s." Documenting the portraiture produced during the hurly-burly decadence of the Weimar Republic—Bob Fosse's film version of "Cabaret" captured the ambiance quite beautifully—the exhibition focuses on an aspect of the movement known as the New Objectivity, specifically the variant sometimes called Verism.

The artists participating in this movement used their painterly powers primarily to depict in scathing, often harshly realist terms the bloody mess that was the Weimar Republic--putatively Germany's first parliamentary democracy, the Republic was hastily organized in the disastrous wake of World War I. Otto Dix's Skat Players, painted in 1920 not long after the declaration of peace, skewers the mutilated, deformed reality of the world he found himself in, by portraying three former soldiers, each with his own bizarre prosthetics, and from a Freudian point of view, endlessly castrated bodies. (The guy on the right is most interesting--despite having no legs, he does have a tiny penis that protrudes onto the caning of his seat, and his prosthetic jaw is adorned with a small photograph of the artist himself, along with the legend 'trademark Dix: only authentic with the picture of the founder'.)

Dix obviously took tremendous license with with these characters, and you might rightly question how this fits in with the idea of Verism, or of New Objectivity.

Stealing much of the show in this regard is the work of Christian Schad, an artist who initially cut his artistic teeth as a member of Zurich Dada (the original anti-war movement!), but who turned away from Dada nonsense experimentation in favor of a style that might best be described as focused early Renaissance.

Schad's sitters are executed in an airtight, almost impossibly chilly style—even as they emanate a deep, perverse eroticism. This tendency is most evident in his painting Two Girls of 1928, at right.

(Yes, they're both masturbating.) Yet the tightness of the painting's execution pins down the potential eroticism of the subject, turning it into an almost scientific dissection of the experience that it represents.

Schad's more straightforward portraits deploy exactly this same, tightly corsetted style (a touch of sadism there, and entirely appropriate in the context of these works). This is academic painting turned upon itself, and ought to be enough to banish forever the idea that a simple return to traditional techniques will set all right with the world. Schad's world is exquisitely executed, and utterly damned. "Glitter and Doom," indeed.

I was hoping to pick up some postcards for reference when I wrote about the exhibition, at the mini gift shop invevitably located at the exit of major exhibitions at the Met. Stunningly, all you can get is a poster—the marketing powers that be seem to be saying that the difficult and disturbing subject matter of this show simply wouldn't make it worth their while to bother printing postcards, and so the shop resembles a library more than a gift store, with a row of mostly academic books and exhibition catalogues available for purchase.

So if you have the chance to get down to the Met before February 19 (the last day of the show), you should absolutely do so! The decadent world on display here, bankrupt of morality or feeling, a world in which the haves are separated by a great divide from the have-nots, a society at war with itself after having entered into a deeply miscalculated war to gain global power...wait, that's sounding a little familiar, no?

So check it out!

Beth E. Wilson has served as the resident art critic for Chronogram since 1999. Trained as an art historian, she also teaches art history at SUNY New Paltz.