At Home Abroad

Had I not been conscious of being away from New York because the garbage was invisible, a month spent poking around museums and galleries in Germany and Switzerland might have convinced me 1 had never left home. Judging from what I saw—admittedly a spotty sampling—the current situation of the arts there seems much asitisin America: a state—one hopes it is only temporary—of suspended animation. Figures and movements whose merits and meanings were being hotly debated ten and twenty years ago are still omnipresent and monopolize exhibition space, their once radical-seeming innovations petrified as though in amber. Nowhere did I encounter the least glimmering of a new trend or unfamiliar talent—only the headline-makers of yesteryear and their all too numerous disciples. Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Photorealism, New Realism—you name it and you’ll find it as easily on Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse as in SoHo or on Madison Avenue. True, the Germans pay more attention to native practitioners of Fantastic Realism like Horst Antes and Horst Janssen (the latter, a draughtsman of incredible refinement and macabre inventiveness, deserves to be better known here). But basically the art scenes of Munich, Zurich, Düsseldorf, and New York seem interchangeable. The Ludwig Collection, Germany’s best-known assemblage of recent art, occupying the top floor of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne pending the completion of its own building, adds up to a smaller, less choice version of the Museum of Modern Art or the Whitney, with few novelties for overseas visitors except its German Expressionists. Unfortunately I missed Munich’s Grosse Kunstausstellung, the huge annual that, each June, occupies the premises of the Haus der Kunst, sole survivor of Hitler’s architectural megalomania. However, an advance look at the catalogue seemed to promise that, like its smaller, Whitney-like cousin, it would be more of the same.

What did impress me on this trip was the way the German museums are delving into their country’s nineteenth century past. Other countries are doing likewise, of course, as witness the mammoth “Art of the Third Empire” that played the Grand Palais in Paris last winter after opening in Philadelphia; recent British reassessments of late-Victorianism also demonstrate the same tendency. In Germany, however, the entire century has come under intensive review, a process that has discredited critics of the 1920s who, like so many Americans of the period, looked at the art of their recent past through French- tinted glasses, dismissing as inferior everything that failed to conform to these standards.

RB

About the Author

Ruth Berenson

Had I not been conscious of being away from New York because the garbage was invisible, a month spent poking around museums and galleries in Germany and Switzerland might have convinced me 1 had never left home. Judging from what I saw—admittedly a spotty sampling—the current situation of the arts there seems much asitisin America: a state—one hopes it is only temporary—of suspended animation. Figures and movements whose merits and meanings were being hotly debated ten and twenty years ago are still omnipresent and monopolize exhibition space, their once radical-seeming innovations petrified as though in amber. Nowhere did I encounter the least glimmering of a new trend or unfamiliar talent—only the headline-makers of yesteryear and their all too numerous disciples. Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Photorealism, New Realism—you name it and you’ll find it as easily on Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse as in SoHo or on Madison Avenue. True, the Germans pay more attention to native practitioners of Fantastic Realism like Horst Antes and Horst Janssen (the latter, a draughtsman of incredible refinement and macabre inventiveness, deserves to be better known here). But basically the art scenes of Munich, Zurich, Düsseldorf, and New York seem interchangeable. The Ludwig Collection, Germany’s best-known assemblage of recent art, occupying the top floor of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne pending the completion of its own building, adds up to a smaller, less choice version of the Museum of Modern Art or the Whitney, with few novelties for overseas visitors except its German Expressionists. Unfortunately I missed Munich’s Grosse Kunstausstellung, the huge annual that, each June, occupies the premises of the Haus der Kunst, sole survivor of Hitler’s architectural megalomania. However, an advance look at the catalogue seemed to promise that, like its smaller, Whitney-like cousin, it would be more of the same.

What did impress me on this trip was the way the German museums are delving into their country’s nineteenth century past. Other countries are doing likewise, of course, as witness the mammoth “Art of the Third Empire” that played the Grand Palais in Paris last winter after opening in Philadelphia; recent British reassessments of late-Victorianism also demonstrate the same tendency. In Germany, however, the entire century has come under intensive review, a process that has discredited critics of the 1920s who, like so many Americans of the period, looked at the art of their recent past through French- tinted glasses, dismissing as inferior everything that failed to conform to these standards.