Went to The Museum of Modern Art. The main event was supposed to be the Dali exhibit, but surrealism is all the rage these days, and the museum was packed. So instead I went to the Kirchner show that was in Members Only previews.
I don’t mind admitting that I’d never actually heard of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner prior to the exhibition. This must be because either:
German artists from the early 1900s who painted prostitutes just didn’t come up in any of the hundreds of finance/accounting/marketing classes upon which I squandered my youthful education.
or
There actually was a prostitute-painting-German-artist lecture between the modules on Derivatives and Queue Theory, but I was too busy running the ensemble cast of my lastest daydream through fresh plot points in my head to notice the subject had changed. By the way, I had a couple of really terrific shows playing there (in my head) between the years 1989 and 1993. The reason that I walked out of the Advanced Accounting final singing was not because I felt I’d done well on the exam.
Actually, now that I mention it, such a class…perhaps the idea’s not that farfetched. They could have offered a semester on Art & Money (or the lack thereof). It would have been part of the Entertainment Management track. We would have discussed the artist, comparing and contrasting the relative merit of said artist’s work before and after he or she took major financial blows and started cutting off limbs, suiciding, or rampaging about the countryside in Flanders.
But I digress.
Ernst Ludwig Kircher. Kirchner was a German artist in the early 1900s. He had issues. He was a German artist in the early 1900s with issues. Things did not end well.
In modern-day New York, if someone calls you or your art “degenerate,” well, there’s no such thing as bad press. (See Case Study: Jenny and Nora Hate My Socks) In Nazi-era Berlin, if someone calls you or your art “degenerate”…I think we can agree, that back then, there was such a thing as bad press.
Anyhow, let’s not get all gloomy, because our man Kirchner, here, created some brilliant art. The stuff I saw was from his Street Scenes period. (I 
want you to see the paintings, but as usual, online cannot come close to the actual experience. Alas, the colors simply do not compare! I’ll give you just one. If you happen to be in NYC, go see the exhibit. If only for his use of chartreuse and peacock blue.)
Kirchner had moved from sleepy Dresden to Berlin at a time when the world was in total flux. He hit the big city, experienced vast amounts of anxiety (artistic and otherwise), and proceeded to try and “walk it off,” by roaming the streets of Berlin. He became fascinated by the frauleins of the night, if you will, and in them he saw a metaphor for the sturm und drang of a Berlin that was tumbling into chaos. When he looked at these women, he saw the juxtaposition of alienation and comraderie. These are the same things he saw when he looked at the city…and when he looked into himself.
Should I, myself, fall into artistic-induced financial ruin, I just want to assure you that you can send packages and cards to the border of France and Belgium–I’ll be rampaging about the countryside in Flanders.
Liz
Filed under: General Babble, Out & About in NY | Tagged: General Babble, Kirchner, Liz Maverick, MOMA
Oh, hey, I like that Kirchner. I’d never heard of him and my dad’s an art teacher. Consider me schooled. I need to get to the MoMA.
Leanna, I would be so excited if my post got someone to go see the exhibit. This particular phase of his work really is extraordinary.
None other than Joyce Kilmer (yes, that Kilmer), editor of the New York Times Book Review, had much to say in those pages about degenerate artists (writers and artists). If he didn’t write the article himself, he certainly seemed to place a lot of conservative voices in his NYT pages who roundly spoke out against these new-fangled modes of expression. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Stair was considered a horror. The Free-verse contingent of poets came in for scathing denigration as did the Vorticists (Ezra Pound and his ilk). There’s little indication, though, that these artists cared all that much what people thought. Part of the point was that they were doing something the establishment hated. Of course “they” didn’t get it. One suspects “they” weren’t supposed to.
And now, Kilmer is remembered primarily for a maudlin verse about a tree while the others he vilified are considered great artists.
It’s probably worth mentioning that Kilmer’s experiences in WWI fundamentally changed his view of the world and I do think that had he not been a casualty of that war, we might well have seen a more important poet emerge.
The NYT archives are fascinating.