johncrosthwaitgotopieces: "Magic Realism" at Tate `Modern

Magic Realism at Tate Modern

The Exhibition’s title, Magic Realism, is a little pedantic, obscure, and perhaps misleading. The subtitle, however, cuts to the chase: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33. But the headline may have had the effect of enticing into the free display some of the meandering crowds of summer tourists, hoping for something rather more comic book than what is in fact on offer.

Certainly there was too much vacant meandering in the galleries. But the Tate is to be congratulated for putting on such a high-class show for no charge.

To begin with the obscure label. “Magic Realism”, as applied to the visual arts in post WW1 Germany, was a description cooked up by a contemporary critic in the 1920s to describe a style that was very “realist” in depicting its main subject matter, but which allowed or incorporated unsettling, not very realist, intrusions – the “magic” bit.

It’s not exactly Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, the novel of that period where the Devil wreaks havoc in Soviet Moscow, but the definition does capture the effect of many of the works.

But the label doesn’t do justice to what is offered. I wrote recently about Aftermath,at the Modern’s sister Tate Britain, which displayed a lot of blistering etchings by artists featured here – Grosz, Dix, Beckmann… I said that the German section was the most coherent part of that exhibition, which purports to chart the history of post WW1 art across the UK, France and Germany. At Tate Modern, the period in Germany, and its art, come even further into focus – and benefits hugely from the number and variety of paintings (as opposed to etchings and drawings) on display.

As the catalogue notes, the influence of expressionism is apparent, as are elements of surrealism.

Rudolf Dischinger Backyard Balcony

But what struck me most forcibly was the exhibition’s explicit reminder that most if not all of the male artists had served in the German army in WW1, and how the awfulness of that experience influence the themes and techniques of their work (in Aftermath, the focus is more on political engagement). Dix, for example, had been a machine gunner: whichever side you fought for, the machine gunner was the perpetrator of mass slaughter.

(Indeed, Dix executed a series of unflinching etchings of the trenches (shown neither here nor at Tate Britain) depicting the horrors endured and witnessed in gruesome detail – and the agents of horror that soldiers were forced to become.)

Thus are rooted some of the recurrent dark preoccupations: with suicides (of which there was many among the veterans),

Rudolf Schlichter The Artist with Two Hanged Women

with murder (of women by men),

Otto Dix Lust Murder

and, in one powerful but ghastly painting, with the Crucifixion story in the New Testament. Christ and the Thieves are shown in death, but with no sign of dignity. The images of their bodies are taken straight from the battlefields of France, more particularly from the rotting corpses hanging on the barbed wire between the opposing trenches.