glitter and doom

(edited and expanded a bit for clarity)

If ever there was a timely art exhibit, it is this one, “Glitter and Doom,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through mid-February), which the curators introduce thus:

Although often romanticized as the backdrop for erotic cabaret shows and sexual licentiousness, German cities of the 1920s were actually in the throes of rampant unemployment, hyperinflation, and social panic. After the initial patriotic fervor for—followed by the crippling devastation of— World War I, a group of artists known as the Verists questioned their own involvement in the atrocities and focused on the country’s quickly changing social landscape and uncertain political future.

Forgoing new modes of abstraction, the artists found worthy subjects in urban denizens of all walks of life, from the war-wounded to the art dealer. With a stark rejection of idealization, the Verists’ portraits captured the stark existence of a populace through an incisive and often satiric form of realism. Unlike the conservative painting styles popular at the time, the Verists’ psychological portraits do not attempt to reproduce likenesses. Rather, with savage distortions of the face and the figure, the artist turns the sitter into an exaggerated type reflecting the extremes of a turbulent era: wealth and poverty, glamour and violence, decadence and banality.

For example: George Grosz’s Pillars of Society, 1926***

Reviewing the show for New York magazine, Mark Stevens writes [emphasis mine]:

In a famous cartoon by Charles Addams, which shows an audience reacting to a movie, everyone appears horrified—sobbing, distraught—except for one man who’s grinning with glee. That man was me at “Glitter and Doom,” the exhibit of Weimar portraits from the twenties that opened last week at the Met. It cheered me up no end. …

The situation in Germany between the wars was much worse than ours is today, but the dark eye of Weimar still beguiles our culture; it asks us to see through the masks of hypocrisy, platitude, and respectability. Imagine what Dix or Grosz would have made of the simian Bush, the feral Rumsfeld, the gloating bullfrog Cheney. Imagine how these Germans would have treated the Clintons, or Ted Haggard. How uncharmed they would be by the toothpaste smile of Tom Cruise.

Instead of art, we have infotainment: People Glitter

and CNN Doom

In the wonderful documentary Billy Wilder Speaks, Wilder says that people don’t go to the movie theater to be told the truth, which hurts. He was right, of course. We go to shows—documentaries included—expecting to be told a story: to be entertained. That didn’t stop Wilder from nudging us sharply in the ribs with his sometimes savage satires.

Art is about the awful truth, which hurts. It’s about human beings turning a savage eye on themselves.

Which is why I love Sacha Baron Cohen:

I’ve whined before about the cultural (and spiritual) poverty of our times.
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*** Grosz’s target was the bourgeoisie: the businessmen, clergy, academics, World War I veterans who supported fascism in 1920s Germany while also indulging in the hedonistic lifestyle whitewashed for Puritanical American audiences by the glittering Hollywood production of Cabaret. A savage critic of the Nazis, Grosz was out of the country when they came to power in 1933 and stayed in the U.S. after he was told that the Nazis had immediately come looking for him. He didn’t return to Germany until 1954. Such is the power of art—as the Nazis knew so well and used so wickedly to their advantage.

(I wrote about the power of documentaries—another form of art—here.)