Past Exhibitions
The Ins and Outs of Self-Taught Art
Reflections on a Shifting Field
January 10, 2012 - April 7, 2012
The Lady and the Tramp
Images of Women in Austrian and German Art
October 11, 2011 - December 30, 2011
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
July 5, 2011 - September 30, 2011
Decadence & Decay
Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz
April 12, 2011 - June 24, 2011
Self-Taught Painters in American 1800-1950
Revisiting the Tradition
January 11, 2011 - April 2, 2011
Marie-Louise Motesiczky
Paradise Lost & Found
October 12, 2010 - December 30, 2010
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
July 13, 2010 - October 1, 2010
Käthe Kollwitz
A Portrait of the Artist
April 13, 2010 - June 25, 2010
Seventy Years Grandma Moses
A Loan Exhibition Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Artist's "Discovery"
February 3, 2010 - April 3, 2010
Egon Schiele as Printmaker
A Loan Exhibition Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Galerie St. Etienne
November 3, 2009 - January 23, 2010
From Brücke To Bauhaus
The Meanings of Modernity in Germany, 1905-1933
March 31, 2009 - June 26, 2009
They Taught Themselves
American Self-Taught Painters Between the World Wars
January 9, 2009 - March 14, 2009
Elephants We Must Never Forget
New Paintings Drawings and Prints by Sue Coe
October 14, 2008 - December 20, 2008
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 24, 2008 - September 26, 2008
Hope or Menace?
Communism in Germany Between the World Wars
March 25, 2008 - June 13, 2008
Transforming Reality
Pattern and Design in Modern and Self-Taught Art
January 15, 2008 - March 8, 2008
Leonard Baskin
Proofs and Process
October 9, 2007 - January 5, 2008
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 5, 2007 - September 28, 2007
Who Paid the Piper?
The Art of Patronage in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
March 8, 2007 - May 26, 2007
Fairy Tale, Myth and Fantasy
Approaches to Spirituality in Art
December 7, 2006 - February 3, 2007
More Than Coffee was Served
Café Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and Weimar Germany
September 19, 2006 - November 25, 2006
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 6, 2006 - September 8, 2006
Parallel Visions II
"Outsider" and "Insider" Art Today
April 5, 2006 - May 26, 2006
Ilija!
His First American Exhibtion
January 17, 2006 - March 18, 2006
Coming of Age
Egon Schiele and the Modernist Culture of Youth
November 15, 2005 - January 7, 2006
Sue Coe:
Sheep of Fools
September 20, 2005 - November 5, 2005
Recent Acquisitions
And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market
June 7, 2005 - September 9, 2005
Every Picture Tells a Story
The Narrative Impulse in Modern and Contemporary Art
April 5, 2005 - May 27, 2005
65th Anniversary Exhibition, Part II
Self-Taught Artists
January 18, 2005 - March 26, 2005
65th Anniversary Exhibition, Part I
Austrian and German Expressionism
October 28, 2004 - January 8, 2005
Sue Coe: Bully: Master of the Global Merry-Go-Round and Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 8, 2004 - October 16, 2004
Animals & Us
The Animal in Contemporary Art
April 1, 2004 - May 22, 2004
Henry Darger
Art and Myth
January 15, 2004 - March 20, 2004
Body and Soul
Expressionism and the Human Figure
October 7, 2003 - January 3, 2004
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 24, 2003 - September 12, 2003
In Search of the "Total Artwork"
Viennese Art and Design 1897–1932
April 8, 2003 - June 14, 2003
Russia's Self-Taught Artists
A New Perspective on the "Outsider"
January 14, 2003 - March 29, 2003
Käthe Kollwitz:
Master Printmaker
October 1, 2002 - January 4, 2003
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 25, 2002 - September 20, 2002
Workers of the World
Modern Images of Labor
April 2, 2002 - June 15, 2002
Grandma Moses
Reflections of America
January 15, 2002 - March 16, 2002
Gustav Klimt/Egon Schiele/Oskar Kokoscha
From Art Nouveau to Expressionism
November 23, 2001 - January 5, 2002
The "Black-and-White" Show
Expressionist Graphics in Austria & Germany
September 20, 2001 - November 10, 2001
Recent Acquisitions (And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 26, 2001 - September 7, 2001
Art with an Agenda
Politics, Persuasion, Illustration and Decoration
April 10, 2001 - June 16, 2001
"Our Beautiful and Tormented Austria!": Art Brut in the Land of Freud
January 18, 2001 - March 17, 2001
The Tragedy of War
November 16, 2000 - January 6, 2001
The Expressionist City
September 19, 2000 - November 4, 2000
Recent Acquisitions (And Some Thoughts on the Current Art Market)
June 20, 2000 - September 8, 2000
From Façade to Psyche
Turn-of-the-Century Portraiture in Austria & Germany
March 28, 2000 - June 10, 2000
European Self-Taught Art
Brut or Naive?
January 18, 2000 - March 11, 2000
Saved From Europe
In Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Galerie St. Etienne
November 6, 1999 - January 8, 2000
The Modern Child
(Images of Children in Twentieth-Century Art)
September 14, 1999 - November 6, 1999
Recent Acquisitions
(And a Look at Sixty Years of Art Dealing)
June 15, 1999 - September 3, 1999
Sue Coe: The Pit
The Tragical Tale of the Rise and Fall of a Vivisector
March 30, 1999 - June 5, 1999
Henry Darger and His Realms
January 14, 1999 - March 13, 1999
Becoming Käthe Kollwitz
An Artist and Her Influences
November 17, 1998 - December 31, 1998
George Grosz - Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
Art & Gender in Weimar Germany
September 23, 1998 - November 11, 1998
Recent Acquisitions
(And Some Thoughts About Looted Art)
June 9, 1998 - September 11, 1998
Taboo
Repression and Revolt in Modern Art
March 26, 1998 - May 30, 1998
Sacred & Profane
Michel Nedjar and Expressionist Primitivism
January 13, 1998 - March 14, 1998
Egon Schiele (1890-1918)
Master Draughtsman
November 18, 1997 - January 3, 1998
The New Objectivity
Realism in Weimar-Era Germany
September 16, 1997 - November 8, 1997
Recent Acquisitions
A Question of Quality
June 10, 1997 - September 5, 1997
Käthe Kollwitz - Lea Grundig
Two German Women & The Art of Protest
March 25, 1997 - May 31, 1997
That Way Madness Lies
Expressionism and the Art of Gugging
January 14, 1997 - March 15, 1997
The Viennese Line
Art and Design Circa 1900
November 18, 1996 - January 4, 1997
Emil Nolde - Christian Rohlfs
Two German Expressionist Masters
September 24, 1996 - November 9, 1996
Breaking All The Rules
Art in Transition
June 11, 1996 - September 6, 1996
Sue Coe's Ship of Fools
March 26, 1996 - May 24, 1996
New York Folk
Lawrence Lebduska, Abraham Levin, Isreal Litwak
January 16, 1996 - March 16, 1996
The Fractured Form
Expressionism and the Human Body
November 15, 1995 - January 6, 1996
From Left to Right
Social Realism in Germany and Russia, Circa 1919-1933
September 19, 1995 - November 4, 1995
Recent Acquisitions
June 20, 1995 - September 8, 1995
On the Brink 1900-2000
The Turning of Two Centuries
March 28, 1995 - May 26, 1995
Earl Cummingham - Grandma Moses
Visions of America
January 17, 1995 - March 18, 1995
Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mam
September 13, 1994 - November 5, 1994
55th Anniversary Exhibition in Memory of Otto Kallir
June 7, 1994 - September 2, 1994
Drawn to Text: Comix Artists as Book Illustrators
May 15, 1994 - January 7, 1995
Sue Coe: We All Fall Down
March 29, 1994 - May 27, 1994
The Forgotten Folk Art of the 1940's
January 18, 1994 - March 19, 1994
Symbolism and the Austrian Avant Garde
Klimt, Schiele and their Contemporaries
November 16, 1993 - January 8, 1994
Art and Politics in Weimar Germany
September 14, 1993 - November 6, 1993
Recent Acquisitions
June 8, 1993 - September 3, 1993
The "Outsider" Question
Non-Academic Art from 1900 to the Present
March 23, 1993 - May 28, 1993
The Dance of Death
Images of Mortality in German Art
January 19, 1993 - March 13, 1993
Art Spiegelman
The Road to Maus
November 17, 1992 - January 9, 1993
Käthe Kollwitz
In Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of the Artist's Birth
September 15, 1992 - November 7, 1992
Naive Visions/Art Nouveau and Expressionism/Sue Coe: The Road to the White House
May 19, 1992 - September 4, 1992
Richard Gerstl/Oskar Kokoschka
March 17, 1992 - May 9, 1992
Scandal, Outrage, Censorship
Controversy in Modern Art
January 21, 1992 - March 7, 1992
Viennese Graphic Design
From Secession to Expressionism
November 19, 1991 - January 11, 1992
The Expressionist Figure
September 10, 1991 - November 9, 1991
Recent Acquisitions
Themes and Variations
May 14, 1991 - August 16, 1991
Sue Coe Retrospective
Political Document of a Decade
March 12, 1991 - May 5, 1991
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka
Watercolors, drawings and prints
January 22, 1991 - March 2, 1991
Egon Schiele
November 13, 1990 - January 12, 1991
Lovis Corinth
A Retrospective
September 11, 1990 - November 3, 1990
Recent Acquisitions
June 12, 1990 - August 31, 1990
Max Klinger, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Kubin
A Study in Influences
March 27, 1990 - June 2, 1990
The Narrative in Art
January 23, 1990 - March 17, 1990
Grandma Moses
November 14, 1989 - January 13, 1990
Sue Coe
Porkopolis--Animals and Industry
September 19, 1989 - November 4, 1989
Galerie St. Etienne
A History in Documents and Pictures
June 20, 1989 - September 8, 1989
Gustav Klimt
Paintings and Drawings
April 11, 1989 - June 10, 1989
Fifty Years Galerie St. Etienne: An Overview
February 14, 1989 - April 1, 1989
Folk Artists at Work
Morris Hirshfield, John Kane and Grandma Moses
November 15, 1988 - January 14, 1989
Recent Acquisitions and Works From the Collection
June 14, 1988 - September 16, 1988
From Art Nouveau to Expressionism
April 12, 1988 - May 27, 1988
Three Pre-Expressionists
Lovis Corinth Käthe Kollwitz Paula Modersohn-Becker
January 26, 1988 - March 12, 1988
Käthe Kollwitz
The Power of the Print
November 17, 1987 - January 16, 1988
Recent Acquisitions and Works From the Collection
April 7, 1987 - October 31, 1987
Folk Art of This Century
February 10, 1987 - March 28, 1987
Oskar Kokoschka and His Time
November 25, 1986 - January 31, 1987
Viennese Design and Wiener Werkstätte
September 23, 1986 - November 8, 1986
Gustav Klimt/Egon Schiele/Oskar Kokoschka
Watercolors, Drawings and Prints
May 27, 1986 - September 13, 1986
Expressionist Painters
March 25, 1986 - May 10, 1986
Käthe Kollwitz/Paula Modersohn-Becker
January 28, 1986 - March 15, 1986
The Art of Giving
December 3, 1985 - January 18, 1986
Expressionists on Paper
October 8, 1985 - November 23, 1985
European and American Landscapes
June 4, 1985 - September 13, 1985
Expressionist Printmaking
Aspects of its Genesis and Development
April 1, 1985 - May 24, 1985
Expressionist Masters
January 18, 1985 - March 23, 1985
Arnold Schoenberg's Vienna
November 13, 1984 - January 5, 1985
Grandma Moses and Selected Folk Paintings
September 25, 1984 - November 3, 1984
American Folk Art
People, Places and Things
June 12, 1984 - September 14, 1984
John Kane
Modern America's First Folk Painter
April 17, 1984 - May 25, 1984
Eugène Mihaesco
The Illustrator as Artist
February 28, 1984 - April 7, 1984
Early Expressionist Masters
January 17, 1984 - February 18, 1984
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Germany's Pioneer Modernist
November 15, 1983 - January 7, 1984
Gustav Klimt
Drawings and Selected Paintings
September 20, 1983 - November 5, 1983
Early and Late
Drawings, Paintings & Prints from Academicism to Expressionism
June 1, 1983 - September 2, 1983
Alfred Kubin
Visions From The Other Side
March 22, 1983 - May 7, 1983
20th Century Folk
The First Generation
January 18, 1983 - March 12, 1983
Grandma Moses
The Artist Behind the Myth
November 15, 1982 - January 8, 1983
Kollwitz
The Artist as Printmaker
September 28, 1982 - November 6, 1982
Aspects of Modernism
June 1, 1982 - September 3, 1982
The Human Perspective
Recent Acquisitions
March 16, 1982 - May 15, 1982
19th and 20th Century European and American Folk Art
January 19, 1982 - March 6, 1982
The Folk Art Tradition
Naïve Painting in Europe and the United States
November 17, 1981 - January 9, 1982
Austria's Expressionism
April 21, 1981 - May 30, 1981
Eugène Mihaesco
His First American One-Man Show
March 3, 1981 - April 11, 1981
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele
November 12, 1980 - December 27, 1980
Summer Exhibition
June 17, 1980 - October 31, 1980
Kollwitz: The Drawing and The Print
May 1, 1980 - June 10, 1980
40th Anniversary Exhibition
November 13, 1979 - December 28, 1979
American Primitive Art
November 22, 1977
Käthe Kollwitz
December 1, 1976
Neue Galerie-Galerie St. Etienne
A Documentary Exhibition
May 1, 1976
Martin Pajeck
January 27, 1976
Georges Rouault and Frans Masereel
April 29, 1972
Branko Paradis
December 1, 1971
Käthe Kollwitz
February 3, 1971
Egon Schiele
The Graphic Work
October 19, 1970
Gustav Klimt
March 20, 1970
Friedrich Hundertwasser
May 6, 1969
Austrian Art of the 20th Century
March 21, 1969
Egon Schiele
Memorial Exhibition
October 31, 1968
Yugoslav Primitive Art
April 30, 1968
Alfred Kubin
January 30, 1968
Käthe Kollwitz
In the Cause of Humanity
October 23, 1967
Abraham Levin
September 26, 1967
Karl Stark
April 5, 1967
Gustav Klimt
February 4, 1967
The Wiener Werkstätte
November 16, 1966
Oskar Laske
October 25, 1965
Käthe Kollwitz
May 1, 1965
Egon Schiele
Watercolors and Drawings from American Collections
March 1, 1965
25th Anniversary Exhibition
Part II
November 21, 1964
25th Anniversary Exhibition
Part I
October 17, 1964
Mary Urban
June 9, 1964
Werner Berg, Jane Muus and Mura Dehn
May 5, 1964
Eugen Spiro
April 4, 1964
B. F. Dolbin
Drawings of an Epoch
March 3, 1964
Austrian Expressionists
January 6, 1964
Joseph Rifesser
December 3, 1963
Panorama of Yugoslav Primitive Art
October 21, 1963
Joe Henry
Watercolors of Vermont
May 1, 1963
French Impressionists
March 8, 1963
Grandma Moses
Memorial Exhibition
November 26, 1962
Group Show
October 15, 1962
Ernst Barlach
March 23, 1962
Martin Pajeck
February 24, 1962
Paintings by Expressionists
January 27, 1962
Käthe Kollwitz
November 11, 1961
Grandma Moses
September 7, 1961
My Friends
Fourth Biennial of Pictures by American School Children
May 27, 1961
Raimonds Staprans
April 17, 1961
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Alfred Kubin
March 14, 1961
Marvin Meisels
January 23, 1961
Egon Schiele
November 15, 1960
My Life's History
Paintings by Grandma Moses
September 12, 1960
Watercolors and Drawings by Austrian Artists from the Dial Collection
May 2, 1960
Martin Pajeck
February 29, 1960
Eugen Spiro
February 6, 1960
Käthe Kollwitz
December 14, 1959
Josef Scharl
Last Paintings and Drawings
November 11, 1959
European and American Expressionists
September 22, 1959
Our Town
One Hundred Paintings by American School Children
May 23, 1959
Marvin Meisels and Martin Pajeck
May 1, 1959
Gustav Klimt
April 1, 1959
Käthe Kollwitz
January 12, 1959
Oskar Kokoschka
October 28, 1958
Village Life in Guatemala
Paintings by Andres Curuchich
June 3, 1958
Two Unknown American Expressionists
Paintings by Marvin Meisels and Martin Pajeck
April 28, 1958
Paula Modersohn-Becker
March 15, 1958
The Great Tradition in American Painting
American Primitive Art
January 20, 1958
Jules Lefranc and Dominique Lagru
Two French Primitives
November 18, 1957
Margret Bilger
October 22, 1957
The Four Seasons
One Hundred Paintings by American School Children
June 11, 1957
Grandma Moses
May 6, 1957
Alfred Kubin
April 3, 1957
Franz Lerch
March 2, 1957
Egon Schiele
January 21, 1957
Josef Scharl
Memorial Exhibition
November 17, 1956
Irma Rothstein
May 19, 1956
Käthe Kollwitz
April 16, 1956
A Tribute to Grandma Moses
November 28, 1955
As I See Myself
One Hundred Paintings by American School Children
May 20, 1955
Juan De'Prey
April 19, 1955
Erich Heckel
March 29, 1955
Freddy Homburger
March 2, 1955
Masters of the 19th Century
January 18, 1955
Oskar Kokoschka
November 29, 1954
Isabel Case Borgatta and Josef Scharl
October 12, 1954
James N. Rosenberg and Eugen Spiro
April 30, 1954
Per Krogh
April 2, 1954
Cuno Amiet
February 16, 1954
Eniar Jolin
January 14, 1954
Irma Rothstein
December 8, 1953
Josef Scharl
November 11, 1953
Grandma Moses
October 21, 1953 - October 24, 1953
Wilhelm Kaufmann
September 30, 1953
Lovis Corinth, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele
May 27, 1953
A Grandma Moses Album
Recent Paintings, 1950-1953
April 15, 1953
Streeter Blair
American Primitive
February 26, 1953
Paintings on Glass
Austrian Religious Folk Art of the 17th to 19th Centuries
December 4, 1952
Hasan Kaptan
Paintings of a Ten-Year-Old Turkish Painter
October 29, 1952
Margret Bilger
May 10, 1952
American Natural Painters
March 31, 1952
Ten Years of New York Concert Impressions by Eugen Spiro; Four New Paintings by
January 26, 1952
I-Fa-Wei
Watercolors of New York by a Chinese Artist
December 1, 1951
Käthe Kollwitz
October 25, 1951
Drawings and Watercolors by Austrian Children
May 21, 1951
Grandma Moses
Twenty-Five Masterpieces of Primitive Art
March 17, 1951
Roswitha Bitterlich
January 18, 1951
Oskar Laske
Watercolors of Vienna and the Salzkammergut
October 14, 1950
Tenth Anniversary Exhibition
Part II
May 11, 1950
Austrian Art of the 19th Century
From Wadlmüller to Klimt
April 1, 1950
Chiao Ssu-Tu
February 18, 1950
Anton Faistauer
January 1, 1950
Tenth Anniversary Exhibition
Part I
November 30, 1949
Autograph Exhibition
October 26, 1949
Gladys Wertheim Bachrach
May 24, 1949
Oskar Kokoschka
March 30, 1949
Eugen Spiro
February 19, 1949
Frans Masereel
January 13, 1949
Ten Years Grandma Moses
November 22, 1948
Käthe Kollwitz
Masterworks
October 18, 1948
American Primitives
June 3, 1948
Egon Schiele
Memorial Exhibition
April 5, 1948
Miriam Richman
February 7, 1948
Vally Wieselthier
Memorial Exhibition
January 10, 1948
Christmas Exhibition
December 4, 1947
Fritz von Unruh
November 10, 1947
Käthe Kollwitz
October 4, 1947
Grandma Moses
May 17, 1947
Lovis Corinth
April 16, 1947
Hugo Steiner-Prag
March 15, 1947
Mark Baum
January 11, 1947
Eugen Spiro
November 25, 1946
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
May 17, 1946
Ladis W. Sabo
Paintings by a New Primitive Artist
April 8, 1946
Georges Rouault
The Graphic Work
February 26, 1946
Käthe Kollwitz
Memorial Exhibition
November 21, 1945
Fred E. Robertson
Paintings by an American Primitive
June 13, 1945
Max Liebermann
The Graphic Work
April 18, 1945
Vienna through Four Centuries
March 1, 1945
Eugen Spiro
January 20, 1945
Grandma Moses
New Paintings
December 5, 1944
Käthe Kollwitz
Part II
October 26, 1944
A Century of French Graphic Art
From Géricault to Picasso
September 28, 1944
Max Liebermann
Memorial Exhibition
June 9, 1944
Juan De'Prey
Paintings by a Self-Taught Artist from Puerto Rico
May 6, 1944
Abraham Levin
April 15, 1944
Lesser Ury
Memorial Exhibition
March 21, 1944
Grandma Moses
Paintings by the Senior of the American Primitives
February 9, 1944
Betty Lane
January 11, 1944
WaIt Disney Cavalcade
December 9, 1943
Käthe Kollwitz
Part I
November 3, 1943
Will Barnet
September 29, 1943
Lovis Corinth
May 26, 1943
Josephine Joy
Paintings by an American Primitive
May 3, 1943
Oskar Kokoschka
Aspects of His Art
March 31, 1943
Eugen Spiro
February 13, 1943
Seymour Lipton
January 18, 1943
Illuminated Gothic Woodcuts
Printed and Painted, 1477-1493
December 5, 1942
Abraham Levin
November 4, 1942
Walt Disney Originals
September 23, 1942
Documents which Relate History
Documents of Historical Importance and Landmarks of Human Development
June 10, 1942
Honoré Daumier
April 29, 1942
Bertha Trabich
Memorial Exhibition of a Russian-American Primitive
March 25, 1942
Alfred Kubin
Master of Drawing
December 4, 1941
Egon Schiele
November 7, 1941
Betty Lane
June 3, 1941
Flowers from Old Vienna
18th and Early 19th Century Flower Painting
May 7, 1941
Weavings by Navaho and Hopi Indians and Photos of Indians by Helen M. Post
January 29, 1941
Georg Merkel
November 7, 1940
What a Farm Wife Painted
Works by Mrs. Anna Mary Moses
October 9, 1940
Saved from Europe
Masterpieces of European Art
July 1, 1940
American Abstract Art
May 22, 1940
Franz Lerch
May 1, 1940
Wilhelm Thöny
April 3, 1940
French Masters of the 19th and 20th Centuries
February 29, 1940
H. W. Hannau
Metropolis, Photographic Studies of New York
February 2, 1940
Oskar Kokoschka
January 9, 1940
Austrian Masters
November 13, 1939
HOPE OR MENACE?
Communism in Germany Between the World Wars
ARTISTS
Anonymous
Grosz, George
Grundig, Lea
Heartfield, John
Keil-Gü, A.
Kollwitz, Käthe
Lindemann
Malsov, A.
Pechstein, Hermann Max
Steiner-Prag, Hugo
ESSAY
In the years between the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in November 1918 and Adolf Hitler's ascension to power in January 1933, Germany became a battleground for the most volatile ideologies of the twentieth century. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which before World War I had been the largest socialist party in Europe, only reluctantly endorsed the Kaiser's abdication and the resultant establishment of Germany's first democratic republic, based in the city of Weimar. Friedrich Ebert, the SPD leader who became the Weimar Republic's first president, was soon accused of betraying socialism because of his alliances with the military/industrial establishment. The German Left fragmented, its most radical members pushing for soviet-style Communism. The threat of Communism, in turn, galvanized the Right. Old-line aristocrats and militarists joined with toxic nationalists, anti-Semites, the frightened bourgeoisie and a growing mass of the unemployed to back Hitler's National Socialist Party. As tensions mounted in the early 1930s, the Communist Party was both the last bulwark against fascism and a cause of its success.
In this turbulent atmosphere, the aesthetic experiments of the prewar Expressionists seemed narcissistically self-indulgent. However, the revolutionary instincts of the Expressionist generation, their disdain for the bourgeoisie and their desire to create new art forms for the modern age, were readily turned to political use by the postwar avant-garde. The majority of these artists backed some form of socialism. The World War had fueled international opposition to capitalism, creating feelings of class solidarity among soldiers who believed they had been sacrificed for the benefit of a safely sequestered ruling class. Harsh conditions on the home front--food shortages, poverty, unemployment, inflation--furthered this sense of class solidarity during and after the war. Artists, such as George Grosz and John Heartfield, who had served in the army were primed to make common cause with the working class. Older artists like Käthe Kollwitz, who had long bemoaned the plight of the poor, welcomed the dawn of a new era. Reflecting optimistically on the Russian revolution of 1917, Kollwitz saw "a hope that from now on people's political development will not be determined only by power, but also by justice."
The early Weimar era was the only period in the history of modern art in which most leading members of the avant-garde sought to engage directly with the broader community. They documented contemporary society in furtherance of a pointed political agenda, believing that the act of bearing witness would inspire constructive change. To this end, they sought to circumvent the conventional means of making and distributing art. Painting was far too bourgeois, too precious, too viscerally marked by the artist's ego. Printmaking, photography and photomechanical reproduction all offered the possibility of reaching a large and ostensibly proletarian audience with inexpensive multiples. The newer techniques, such as photo-montage, also had the advantage of minimizing any traces of the artist's personal touch.
Grosz, Heartfield and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde, who had met during the war, exploited the latest in typography and graphic design in their collaborative publishing ventures. Their wartime protest magazine Neue Jugend (New Youth) spawned the Malik Verlag in 1917, which in turn published a number of portfolios featuring lithographic reproductions of Grosz's drawings, as well as satirical tabloids such as Jedermann sein eigener Fussball (Everyman His Own Soccer Ball) and Die Pleite (Bankruptcy). Artists' desire to further a leftwing agenda did not escape the notice of actual politicians, who used modern graphics to bring their message to the masses. Kollwitz, Grosz and Heartfield were joined by a retinue of other, often anonymous or pseudonymous, artists who created posters and broadsheets for a variety of causes.
Following the 1918 German revolution, the nation effloresced with a multitude of new artistic and political groups. The Novembergruppe (November Group) and Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art), both in Berlin, and the Dresdner Sezession--Gruppe 19 (Dresden Secession Group 19), in Dresden, were formed to give cultural workers a voice, alongside the more overtly proletarian Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, in shaping the nascent regime's policies. The future direction of the republic would be determined by whether the proletarian councils--fashioned along the lines of Russian soviets--would be allowed to assume direct control of the government. The SPD favored democratic elections with universal suffrage, while the more radical Spartacists believed that "proletarian democracy" was required to wrest control of the nation from the bourgeoisie. To signal their complete break with the SPD, the Spartacists on December 31, 1918, rechristened themselves the Communist Party (KPD). Grosz, Heartfield and Herzfelde were among the first to sign up.
Like their comrades in Russia, the German Communists had difficulty getting Marxist ideology to conform to reality, and vice versa. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, in response to the harsh inequities produced by early nineteenth-century industrialization. Communism, an organic reaction against those inequities, was supposed to follow capitalist industrialization. Communism was not supposed to take root in a backward, largely agrarian country like Russia. Lenin and his Bolshevik supporters worried that their revolution would fail unless it was succeeded and bolstered by revolutions in more industrialized nations, and so they placed great hope in the German Communist Party. However, it turned out that most German workers supported the SPD. The KPD was therefore divided between those who wanted to work within the electoral system and those who wanted to stage an immediate putsch. In January 1919, a poorly organized Communist uprising was brutally suppressed by the Freikorps, a rightwing paramilitary organization brought in by the government. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the leaders of the KPD, were arrested and murdered.
At the request of Liebknecht's family, Kollwitz sketched the slain leader, a martyr not just to the Communist cause but to the idealistic hopes of the Weimar Republic. As she gradually reworked these sketches over the next two years--first as drawings, then as an etching, then a lithograph and finally a woodcut--the focus shifted from Liebknecht himself to the surrounding crowd of mourners. In the final images, the inert corpse is anything but heroic; the woodcut is a memorial to the bereft public and a statement about the futility of violence. Because Kollwitz was not a Communist, the Party objected to the print, which was sold to establish a fund for indigent workers and artists. "I am no revolutionary, but an evolutionary," Kollwitz explained. "If I were young now, I would certainly be a Communist. . . But I am in my fifties. I have lived through the war and seen . . . thousands of youths die. I am horrified and shattered by all the hate in the world. I long for a socialism that would let people live, and believe that the world has seen enough of murder, lies, destruction, perversion, in short, enough of evil. A Communist regime built on such things cannot be God's work."
Attempts to establish Communist regimes aligned with the Moscow government failed, not just in Germany, but also in Hungary and Austria. Weakened by several years of civil war, the Russian Soviets needed to postpone their plans for worldwide revolution and to establish order at home. In 1921, Lenin asked Willi Münzenberg, a self-styled "professional revolutionary," to set up a German organization to solicit Russian famine relief. The Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (International Workers' Aid, or IAH) anticipated the sort of broad-based approach that came to characterize Soviet propaganda in the mid 1920s. Directed from Moscow rather than by the KPD, the IAH continued to fund-raise and to organize cultural events long after the famine was over. The idea--formalized as the "United Front" in 1922--was to encourage support for Communist issues from unaffiliated workers and intellectuals. "Fronts" like the IAH prided themselves on the participation of famous non-Communists, such as Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and Kollwitz. "Friendship societies" were created abroad to foster sympathetic interest in the Soviet Union. Cultural exchanges--like a 1922 exhibition of Russian art in Berlin and a 1924 show of German art in Moscow--followed.
The campaign to win hearts and minds for the Communist cause naturally seeded a new crop of publications and artists' organizations. Some, like the satirical magazine Der Knüppel (The Cudgel, edited by Grosz and Heartfield between 1923 and 1927) had open ties to the KPD. Others, like theArbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers' Illustrated Newspaper, or AIZ, started by Münzenberg in 1925) did not. The Rote Gruppe (Red Group), of which Grosz was chair and Heartfield secretary, represented leftwing artists and coordinated contributions to the 1924 Moscow exhibition. It was supplanted in 1928 by the Assoziation Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands (Association of Revolutionary German Artists, or ARBKD), often referred to as the ASSO (for Assoziation). Co-founded by Heartfield, the ARBKD was sister to a like-named artists' organization in Moscow. Its mission, mirroring a renewed aggressiveness in Soviet policy, was to "support class war" through the style and content of its members' work.
A zany, almost lighthearted sensibility had distinguished Grosz's and Heartfield's collaborations in the 'teens and early 1920s, when both had been leaders of the iconoclastic Dada movement. Caricature and social commentary were still Grosz's forte, but the exigencies of propaganda demanded a more purposeful, constructive attitude. Grosz was criticized for his negativity, which the Russians considered a reflection of the "sick state of German society," of problems that had (so they claimed) long since vanished in the Soviet Union. However Grosz, who traveled to Russia in 1922, knew the truth. He saw that already the privileges of power were beginning to establish differences in the living standards of Party officials and the average worker. He saw a great artist, Vladimir Tatlin, sharing a squalid apartment with chickens. While Grosz did not expect or demand that utopia should follow immediately on the heels of revolution, he faulted the Soviets for pretending otherwise. Grosz remained loyal to the attempt to realize the Communist dream in Russia and to the cause of social justice at home, but he was constitutionally incapable of lying.
Unlike Grosz, Heartfield continued to enthusiastically champion the Soviets, and his style was somewhat better suited to this purpose. Heartfield was one of the inventors of photomontage, a melding of photography and Cubist collage that proved among the most versatile of the new techniques developed after the First World War. By the late 1920s, with the addition of type, photomontage had become the mainstay of Heartfield's book, magazine and poster designs, as well as a trend in commercial advertising. The AIZ, for which Heartfield designed over 230 photomontages between 1930 and 1938, was one of many popular illustrated magazines that recognized the power of photographs, accompanied by a few well-chosen words, to seduce and convince. Russian artists, searching for the perfect proletarian style, hit upon something they called "polygraphy": a graphic combination of photography and typography. Whereas Heartfield relied on humor and satire like a traditional political cartoonist, the Russians used photomontage more bluntly, to craft grand tributes to Soviet achievement. When he visited the USSR in 1931-32, Heartfield was on the whole well-received by the "polygraphers," though there was some grumbling about whether he or the Russian Gustav Klutsis deserved credit for inventing photomontage. More rigid ideologues, however, pointed to Heartfield's roots in the "decadent" Dada movement and to the obvious similarities between photomontage and bourgeois advertising. As cultural policies hardened under Stalin in the 1930s, the Soviet revolutionaries would increasingly endorse socialist realism--ironically promoting the most retrograde artistic style as the only valid one.
Through the various ups-and-downs and policy shifts that had taken place in the USSR during the 1920s, the Communists had never abandoned hopes of establishing a kindred regime in Germany. The international depression triggered by the American stock-market crash of 1929 seemed to prove Marx's theory that capitalism was destined to self-destruct. At the same time, dire economic conditions--massive unemployment and the curtailment of foreign credit--strengthened the appeal of the Nazi Party.
The early 1930s were punctuated by increasingly severe clashes between the Communists and the Nazis, neither of which had faith in the ability of the elected government to solve Germany's problems. In the 1930 parliamentary elections, both the Nazis and the Communists made enormous gains at the expense of the SPD. The 1932 elections affirmed this trend, and subsequently the politics of proportional representation sealed Germany's fate. The KPD would not countenance a coalition with the SPD, but Hitler was able to obtain the backing of the rightwing National Party and to assume the chancellorship on January 30, 1933.
The fight against fascism now became a cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy, which advocated a "Popular Front" uniting leftwing factions abroad. Heartfield was among those who feared that Nazi Germany would attempt to "save" capitalism by fomenting war, much as had been the case in 1914. He put his abiding faith in the USSR as a bastion of peace and freedom against militaristic totalitarianism. After escaping the SS by jumping from the balcony of his apartment, Heartfield fled to Prague, where he continued to produce photomontages for the AIZ (renamed the Volks-Illustrierte, People's Illustrated, in 1936). When the Nazis began closing in on Prague in 1938, he moved to England. Back in Germany, Hitler quickly shut down all obvious sources of dissident art. The ASSO was dissolved. Avant-garde artists were forbidden to exhibit, and their work was removed from museums. Kollwitz, the first female professor at the Prussian Academy of Art, was stripped of her title and studio. Grosz, who saw the writing on the wall, had accepted a teaching assignment in New York in 1932.
One of the only artists who continued to produce anti-fascist art in Hitler?s Germany was Lea Langer Grundig, a young printmaker who operated in such obscurity that she was, for a time, able to escape notice. Born into a bourgeois Jewish family, she was introduced to radical politics by her future husband, the painter Hans Grundig. In 1926 the couple joined the KPD and in 1928, the same year that they married, the Dresden ASSO chapter. Ironically, it was only after 1933 that Lea came into her own artistically. Hans had somehow acquired an etching press, which she used to create four series of prints documenting conditions in Nazi Germany: Woman's Life, Under the Swastika, The Jew is to Blame and War Threatens! Produced between 1933 and 1937, Grundig's etching cycles gradually take a more polemical approach in their opposition to Hitler. The earlier works, such as the Woman's series, offer blunt social commentary that, while tinged with an intimate feeling for human relationships, can be as harsh as anything penned by Grosz. Some of the strongest works are those in which this sort of acute contextual observation is combined with didactic symbolism. Seen as a group, the prints were both a palpable contradiction of Nazi propaganda and a visceral warning of worse to come. Grundig risked her life to circulate them. In 1938, both she and her husband were arrested. Lea was given permission to emigrate to Palestine, and Hans was sent to a concentration camp.
The Grundigs survived World War II and were reunited in Dresden in 1949. However Hans, riddled with tuberculosis, was a shadow of his former self, and Lea found that the Communist authorities disapproved of her work's "ugliness." Heartfield, too, was viewed with suspicion upon returning to East Germany after the war, both because of his stay in England and because of his ties to Willi Münzenberg, who broke with Stalin over the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Only after Stalin's death did the climate ease enough for Heartfield and Grundig to be elected to the Academy, in 1956 and 1961 respectively. Grosz, for his part, failed to find happiness in America. His disillusionment with Communism morphed into a more generalized misanthropy, but no matter how shrilly he voiced his complaints, he could not rouse the Americans from their comfortable torpor. Grosz returned to Germany in 1959 and died almost immediately thereafter from a drunken fall. Kollwitz had succumbed to old age in 1945, just a few weeks before the armistice.
Marx believed that in a true Communist society, complete equality would prevail, and everyone would be free to develop to his or her fullest capacities. The realities of Soviet Communism, of course, belied this utopian fantasy. Nevertheless, some of Marx's observations about capitalism were accurate. Capitalism can be enormously destructive. In creating new markets, products and jobs, it annihilates the old; capitalism is inherently unstable, thriving on chaos and change. And insofar as capitalists calculate success in purely monetary terms, they are oblivious to human well-being, values and the environment. The Great Depression was widely taken as a call to balance capitalism's destructive excesses. The New Deal in the U.S. before World War II, and Social Democratic legislation in Europe thereafter, were attempts to temper the harshness inherent in the capitalist system. Today, free-market capitalism is generally considered inseparable from democracy. We are only beginning to recognize that free-market capitalism eventually fosters inequality, and inequality eventually kills democracy. Marx grasped this paradox, but he was no more capable than we are of resolving it.
We would like to convey our warmest thanks to Merrill C. Berman and Richard Simms, whose generous cooperation made this exhibition possible. Checklist entries include catalogue raisonné numbers, where applicable. Unless otherwise indicated, image dimensions are given for the prints and full dimensions for all other works, including the posters.