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Glitter and Doom, German Portraits from the 1920s

2007; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

1756-1183

Marion F. Deshmukh,

Photography and Visual Culture

Rewald, Sabine. With essays by Ian Buruma and Matthias Eberle. Glitter and Doom, German Portraits from the 1920s. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. 292 pp. $65.00 cloth. While it may not be polite to subscribers of The German Quarterly to mention Johannes Molzahn's 1928 Kunstblatt article titled Stop Reading, Look! it does sum up a critical aspect of Weimar culture-namely the importance of the visual. Visual culture could be observed in countless ways: advertisements assaulting consumers in popular magazines, films which amazed mass audiences, or the glaring lights of Berlin cabaret. Darker images also confronted Germans during the 1920s such as the sheer numbers of severely injured returning veterans of World War I viewed daily by passengers on trams. Other observations included the frequent street battles between extremist political groups attempting to overthrow a republic viscerally hated by a few, disliked by many, and tolerated by most. The ubiquitous Berlin photographic studios, which approximated 430 in number during the 1920s attested to the increased popularity of the medium and of the portrait generally. Glitter and Doom, German Portraits from the 1920s, mounted by the Metropolitan Museum from November 14,2006, through February 19, 2007, closely connected the new objectivity of the Weimar painters to the verism of photography. The portraits showcased in this important exhibit display disturbing images of an era bracketed by the carnage of World War I and the frightening totalitarian regime that would condemn these images and the artists who created them. The well-attended exhibition itself received rave reviews by the major critics. The curator arrayed the classic Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Christian Schad works in five spacious rooms. The images are those we often associate with the troubled Weimar years. But lesser known painters, such as Karl Hubbuch and Rudolf Schlichter were also represented with a fine selection of portraits in oil along with sketches in pen and pencil. The catalogue includes iconic images not represented in the show, such as Dix's pre-eminent symbol of the emancipated Weimar woman, The Journalist Sylvia van Harden, 1926. The painting is included together with two fascinating photographs taken of her: one, in the mid-1930s and one in 1961 when von Harden, now a stout woman, posed by her Weimar portrait. The exhibition and catalogue both serve to introduce Americans to the importance of Weimar portraiture as biting political visual texts. Grosz and Dix ruthlessly caricatured Weimar society-its center and periphery. …