Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
Expressions of the Age
By James Fenton
Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und der Untergang Preussens [Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Decline of Prussia]
catalog of the exhibition edited by Katharina Henkel and Roland März
an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, April 27–August 12, 2001
Berlin: G + H Verlag/ Nationalgalerie, 317 pp., DM39 (paper)
What is it called—that legendary period of German art in the early part of the twentieth century? Some people think of it as Weimar, but the Weimar Republic only covers the second half of it. Others use the word Expressionism, but that term is best confined to certain artists of the time—such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde—or to certain periods of their work. One standard account of German Expressionism ends with the outbreak of World War I. And while the artists of the New Objectivity, the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s—among them Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and Georg Grosz—are associated closely in our minds with the Expressionists, their work is produced in conscious distinction from them.
Review, 2710 words
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