Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart
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Spent a day at this former 19th century train station in Mitte, the first terminal style station in Berlin, currently a gallery for modern art and temporary storage for a substantial portion of the art of the Nationalgalerie during its renovation. I meandered through two extraordinary exhibitions, the first, a breadth of Carl Andre’s works, from sculpture, “concrete poetry” and “dada forgeries” to photography and a full catalogue of mail art. The second exhibit, the draw, was the Neue Galerie: The Black Years, Histories of a Collection: 1933–1945, which “features works from the Nationalgalerie which were either created between 1933 and 1945, acquired by the collection during this period, or seized by the National Socialist regime.”

The exhibit includes an incredible diversity of artists, including those who collaborated with the Nazis to implement their visions of the “Aryan ideal” and uphold the mythology of the German bloodline, as well as artists who underwent an “inner migration” and continued to produce art under the auspices of Reich Chamber of Fine Arts merely to maintain their practice, as well as those who worked in exile, in secrecy or in bold defiance of the regime.

The history of each piece is given in detail, including the location of the production of the work, original owners and exhibitions/galleries it may have been shown in or belonged to, to its trace during the Nazi era – whether it was deemed degenerate and shown as a part of a degenerate art exhibition, stashed away, or sold/stolen by Nazi officials – either by official dealers commissioned by the NS to divest confiscated works to fund the Reich or by lone figures such as Goebbels and Goering for personal gain/prestige.

I stood before a painting by Edvard Munch titled “Melancholy” to re-enact the captivated-aura psychogeography assignment, though in reality I basked in suspension before all of the paintings and sculptures, and only made a decision about this work at last. This piece, selected for this exhibit not for it’s relevance to degeneracy, subversion or controversial history, was an example of the categorical inconsistencies within the National Socialist party as to what “degenerate” art appears as. Melancholy is wildly expressionist, with the figure of a woman in a red plume of a dress sitting at a bench, her upper torso doubled forward as her blue hair cascades over her head and into the sea. All figures and landscapes are suggested, the sea, a sea-stack, the horizon, the sun, a cityscape – all sweeping and vivid gestures, without definition at first glance.  The work was painted in 1906/7, prior to any major war. Goebbels, upon seeing the piece, deemed Munch the “Nordic father of Expressionism”, before appropriating the work in 1937 and selling it to a dealer in Oslo. The brushstrokes and errant drips are sweepingly powerful, exact by suggestion; the aura is in the movement of the strokes, the vivaciousness of the color and the forlornness of the figure are in a harmonized tension, a tense harmony. An excess of blue paint is left where free to fall and stain without distraction, but rather to emphasize the movement of the work – it is an untold mark of beauty. In some corners the tweed of the material used for a canvas is left exposed, further emphasizing not heedlessness, but an intensity of focus on aspects disinterested in perfection – indicating that the skill and precision of this work is not the immediate technique or form, but what the work reveals in its expression.

There are many other pieces in this collection with complicated histories and impossible “auras” – from the “Isle of the Dead” by Arnold Boecklin, to famous works by Dix, Kirchner, Picasso, Kollwitz & Klee, to canvases that conceal secrets of a double past and others that make for subversive interpretations.

Definitely worth the visit!

http://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/neue-galerie-die-schwarzen-jahre.html

Erwin Hahs – Great Requiem, 1944/1945