A few weeks ago, I visited the timely exhibition “Look at the People” at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart that focused on the reality between World War I and II, covering much of the period from 1919 to 1939. It contrasted the hope under the short-lived Weimar Republic in Germany with the post war misery and injustice of a century ago. This was history, but it is also the present again, unfortunately. We need artists to document the price of war, to stir up outrage, to warn our “leaders”. History is repeating itself, not identically of course, but the pain of families and communities losing loved ones is as real with every single loss.
I wish to focus here briefly on historical painters such as Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, appreciated for their hard realism for a century now, and then explore in a little more depth the work of the young artist – Claudia Magdalena Merk. Her paintings warned us of war even before it returned to Europe and reemerged in the Middle East as a growing tsunami of suffering and loss. Her paintings were in an earlier exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, but they speak with a new language and urgency, a painterly freshness, beseeching us to avoid repetition of the follies of history when and where we can. The world has entered a new era of a tinderbox, so we should heed the artist’s sight.
To the first master of pain: Otto Dix. Trench war (1932) shows a soldier staring, stunned at the horror of it all, his gas-masked companion, fallen at his side, both still holding their rifles, in a desolate landscape of destroyed trees and mud, their minds as shattered as the land. The painting shows one soldier in sullied brown, two. There were 15 to 22 million who died in World War I.
The painting is horrific, yes, but don’t look away. We should remember what we all have to lose, what many have lost and are currently losing and strengthen resolve to stop the inhumanity of it all. Most do look away from that painting and from Dix’s paintings of soldier amputees in the street while prostitutes make their way to the music halls to laugh and lounge with the unharmed rich. The painter captures the new reality of things being the way they are – Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) – romanticism was buried for good with the war. “Stare reality in the face and don’t flinch” could be another moto for the new post war artistic movement.
Another master of social criticism was Georg Grosz, who also mocked the grotesque elite, society’s blindness to social suffering. In his No One Cares about Them (1922). his pen and ink, black and white drawings capture the bloated, coated rich and the ragged, thin, forgotten heroes. There was no room for colour in those lives, in that society. Grosz whittled his lines down to the essence of reality, the unadulterated truth.
Colour communicates, and while Grosz also painted in colour, it is to Claudia Magdalena Merk we now turn. Our Brave Soldier (2017), is a grinning skeleton. Standing tall and proud, despite being already dead. The uniform is a fresh green, not the mud of the trenches of the Battle of the Somme. The boots are polished, shiny black. The rest of the painting has torn reality in vibrant colours. Nothing is discernible. Perhaps this mocks modern games of war on our computers, phones. A leisure. A distraction. But there is enough red in the painting to warn us, the blue sky darkens to grey, black, with the smoke of death.
The painting below – Dimension of War (2018) – shows a calm discussion, perhaps the officer and his soldier fine-tuning a strategy, tactics, or sharing an update on the situation on the ground. Again the boots are polished. A statement that war had yet to start, or an echo back to the reality of the trenches that people polished boots to give themselves a sense of control over their lives in mortal peril. Self-delusion is one of humankind’s most well-developed survival skills. Yet, in the painting everywhere there is blood red. There is no pain on the faces, indeed they don’t really have faces. But reality is about real individuals suffering. Leaders should remember this.
Thief with Victim (2019), even though it has only a patch of blood on the centre bottom, is harder, with the strung-up, upside down, headless victim. The green uniform is spotless, again is Claudia Magdalena Merk presenting the clearly absurd, in order to have us think of the foolish self-delusion of war? The thief, I presume, stole a soul. The German word “Opfer” means victim, but can also mean “sacrifice”. On which altar, to which false god, was this sacrifice dedicated to?
The exhibitions are now over, but the message lives on. And the bookshop at the Stuttgart Kunstmuseum have books on each of the above-mentioned artists.
It is a matter of personal taste and sensibility whether the blunt reality of Dix reveals the horrors of war best to you. Or the acidic social satire of Georg Grosz. Or the ironic colourful compositions of Claudia Magdalena Merk that communicate our fatefully fine-tuned ability at self-delusion, making us blind to the threats of war. This blindness is also about the realities of social injustice or indeed climate and environmental injustice that may spark new crisis, new wars over resources. The artists of the New Objectivity movement told us a hundred years ago that we should stare reality in the face. Claudia Magdalena Merk’s ironic objectivity warns us that we often choose not to see what is before us. That is a choice.
