On The Mad Square @ AGNSW

I think it's fair to say that AGNSW's show of inter-war German art, 'The Mad Square' is not a bundle of laughs. Covering the period from 1910 to 1937 was never going to yield anything bucolic or uplifting but the sheer cumulative claustrophobic effect of jagged asymmetry and post-mortem colours is quite draining. When my other half and I left toward the exit she wondered aloud if we had time for another scene of rape and mutilation before we left. The truth of course is that we know only too well what happens when Germany steps out beyond that closing year of 1937. The work here is a pre-cursor to something clearly terrible. Early on in the show we see 'The Suicide' by George Grosz. In it sharply drawn dogs that seem to have been skinned roam the streets sniffing out life, a scarecrow of a man hangs from a lamppost while another, still holding a revolver, lies dead in the street a cloud that may be his soul departing as a jutting chinned, graze nippled prostitute looks out from an upper storey window. The dominant colour is red, the corpses skull face, the roads and pavements are a differing dark tone soy bloody scarlet. The effect is suffocating, violent, and it might sum up the feeling of the show as a whole.

The waft of Sigmund Freud reaches from Vienna to Berlin, faces morph, murderers and secrets are below or behind. There's something overindulgent here. The exaggerations and contortions, the splenetic angst all remind me of method acting. Much gets lost in the layering on of effects bodies are twisted AND discoloured AND the colours are vivid and queasy. A social, political and inner world is played out with the big capital letters of technique. In 'The Suicide' a symbolic world is played out in a blood red light. One is reminded of nothing so much as Heironymous Bosch, the sinister meeting the opaque. Sometimes the neurosis is disturbing and comical, 'The Sex Murderer' by Heinrich-Maria Davinghausen is a seedy Freudian replay of Henri Rousseau's dreamscapes. The naturalistic body of the would-be victim contrasts with the grotesque mask of a face and the cubist angularity of windows and the folds of a bed sheet make the peach soft flesh seem all the more vulnerable. What's striking about this and so many other of the works here is how intertwined social and sexual anxieties appear to be.

The printmaking in the show is often the most powerful work in any given room. The medium encourages a formal retrain and subsequently maximum affect is caused with minimum effects. The prints here , some of them now iconic images, mix a the stark objectivity of near reportage with a sharp and steely line. The prints here, street scenes, detailed examinations of obscenely disfigured war veterans, the living skulls in the trenches are at once cold and deeply touching. Otto Dix's 'Stormtroopers (Assault Under Gas)' benefits from the level of control that allows the bone white paper of the gas masks shine through and remind us of skulls, whilst the slightest scrape across the surface of the printing plate evokes the seep of gas. Economy of technique yields results as shocking as a Wilfred Owen poem.

It's hard to look at the prints on show and still subscribe to the decadence chic image of Weimar Germany. They represent a more complex picture, one of victims rather than ogres, of organised resistance rather than simple reflex disgust and of people attempting to be objective recorders. The print was the earliest form of mass media, the vehicle for propaganda and persuasion from the Reformation onward, and when it is used here it retains some of that didactic power. The woodcuts of Kåthe Kollwitz combine the simplicity of an icon or a holy medallion with the strong impression that a human hand was involved. The left wing printmakers are not the only artists with a manifesto here, and it's the absence of that visible human hand is what makes the Constructivist parts of the show so arid. Given the frailty of broken human bodies and human greed and hatred it's not a great surprise that there should be a response to the organic writing of expressionism that believed in the utopian power of geometry and machines. Of course that mechanical certainty gave a scientific gloss technocratic murder, but at the time any answer must have looked appealing.

It's difficult not to draw political conclusions in work like this. Between the apocalypse of the First World War and the Holocaust of the second Germany is torn by economic and cultural forces that seem to have an altogether destructive edge. What's interesting here is how the images of resistance, coming in this compass-less world from what we might traditionally think of as the Left, are anguished and violent in form and palette. Much of the work from the left demonstrates a revulsion at the squalor beneath the Weimar jollity, it's a healthy antidote to the romanticised view we have today of cabarets and bohemians in old Berlin but it's a cracked and smeared mirror. The right, or at least the anti-Bolsheviks, are no less dark but they demonstrate the rat cunning of focus in what and who they choose to vilify. Throughout one is left with a feeling of inevitability, that Germany were to descend into a genocidal spiral is no great surprise when so much of the work has such a palpable dehumanizing sense of self-loathing.

Max Beckmann's art seems to find a link between the psychic contortions and the political landscape. Full of uniforms and hierarchies, the vertical compositions are striking. Beckmann creates hermetically sealed worlds where the protagonists seem to obey their own perfectly logic and physics. The figures in their hard outlines seem to occupy real space as they jostle for position on the canvas. The clear stratification and the love of uniform hint point to a militaristic society where only the immediate game is important. Through the circus performers in 'The Trapeze' Beckmann captures a blank eyed madness, the acquiescence and conformity that can doom a society. The figures, in complex twisting motion reflect some of that freikorperkultur that Nazi artists like Leni Reifenstahl would celebrate, but the pale skin and the sickly green of the leotards suggest something rotten beneath the flexing musculature. Beckmann's solid figures capture the power of will but also the precariousness of living in an arbitrary dictatorship, that mix of allure and anxiety is perhaps the most nuanced psychological portrait in the show.

John Heartfield's work looks like what can happen when nihilistic DaDa grows up. Here the appropriated imagery cut into photomontage has a purpose, the cheap newspaper images cheapen their nazi subject, Heartfield finds a way to demystify the Nazis by refusing to memorialise them with something more artful. What Heartfield did brilliantly was to allow leave his images cool and objective, thus in 'Adolf The Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk' he adopts the clinical mode of the X-Ray, in juxtaposition to the overheated rhetoric and twisted face of Hitler. The critique is scalpel sharp and makes both his contemporary avant-gardistes and modern satirists look like indulgent dilettantes by comparison. I find Heartfield's work the most hopeful here, and I don't usually look tab history through a Panglossian lens, as it has a precise and brilliantly sharp response to evil. By comparison so much of the earlier work in the show feels like a pre-conscious reflex, an unformed and garish loathing.

I would be lying if I said I liked much of the work in 'The Mad Square'. All of this jarring, often repulsive, imagery makes for a curious experience. Through any regular lens much of the work is ugly and alienating, the paint often seems to crawl and slither with revulsion. However it is undeniably interesting historically (the AGNSW has specialised in 'interesting' in recent years with many shows feeling like extended lectures) and many of the impulses of DaDa and expressionism are at the heart of the established notion of the institutionalised avant-garde today. It feels like the gallery has missed a trick though, the hang is based around art school movements so we shift through Expressionism and DaDa and Constructivism and the Bauhaus. As a result the work looks highly formal in a way that a more thematic or a chronological organisation might have avoided. I'm not sure what lessons you draw from art like this and whether they seem flippant in the light of genocide, however I can't help but think that when societies are so able to imagine themselves and others as monsters or machines the imperative we have to treat one another as human beings is easier to forget.

European Masters @ NGV

I normally try to avoid comment on how exhibitions are branded or what they're called. In the case of 'European Masters' the NGV's show of works from Frankfurt's Stådel Museum. The problem might be that the catch all title doesn't quite capture what's going on here. The lead image of a Renoir lunch suggests an impressionist blockbuster awaits inside. Instead the NGV houses a path through the neurotic spasms of a national identity seeking a form. That nation is Germany through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. There's some great and compelling works hung inside here but there's also a lot of painting that is, frankly, kitsch and odd. Edited and pulled together it creates an interesting narrative, made sinister as we know the tragic point where it ends. So whilst there are great examples of Degas and Bonnard here they're not the real story, instead the odd procession from Romanticism through Symbolism to Expressionism captures something much stranger, if less immediately pleasurable.

German Romanticism is a complex set of impulses. Here it encompasses the neo-classicism, pagan fantasies and historical mythmaking. The pictures here show less of the primal urge toward the sublime that we might find in Casper David Freidrich and a far more twee version. Medieval and classical figures find themselves in the dark German forests, forging a link between the geography and culture. The images are polite, bloodless and a highly mediated version of nature making this very different fare to Romantics such as Goya or Turner operating elsewhere. Lighting is often theatrical and compositions tend to signpost the meaningful relation between the landscape and those inserted into it leaving each work looking like a restrained polemic. What becomes clear here, and never leaves through the rest of the rooms, is a penchant for fairly heavy handed symbolism without a corresponding stylistic tension. The approach feels all or nothing. Certain works look like academic exercises whilst others are full of bombast, all too often what they fail to provide is depth or ambiguity.

It seems fitting that in amongst the German work, and a respectable room of impressionism, there are smatterings of artists like James Ensor and Henri Rousseau, who are almost sui generis and and yet seem to add to the feverish searching of German artists. Amongst these figures is Odilon Redon. The work 'Christ and the Samaritan Woman' is of such hallucinatory beauty and mystical strangeness that one can hardly bear to walk away from it. There is a biblical story in there somewhere but it hardly matters. A Christ figure, manifests out of a layers of ochre at once a mirage and the memory of someone real. In the foreground the profile of a woman who is almost sculptural but who, with the greatest economy of paint, appears to be in a state of transcendent serenity. There's an abstract splash of purple in the middle of the frame and a scarlet wound of paint, like the sacred heart and something like a cloud or a splash below Christ, describing them is hard but together they feel like something necessary and essential that happens between these two figures. The tenderly minimal expressions (both have eyes downcast or closed) convey a sense of grace and surrender and allow us to identify the human core of something deeply spiritual. It's a wonderful quiet painting.

There are surprises. Wilhelm Trübner's 'Moor Reading a Newspaper' is beautiful and a real shock. This small portrait takes on the drab black blues and greens of workman's serge and imparts an oily quality to the air. The composition cuts the frame in a diagonal as the seated figures rest his feet, the light of a nineteenth century room hardly picking out black skin. It's the light that makes this so brilliant though. The only objects that stick out form a line across the middle of the painting, a pair of gloves on the empty portion of the chaise, the snow white newspaper and a hat and cane. This isn't a work that attempts o make exotic, rather one that defiantly normalises with symbols of bourgeois life. The newspaper, holding its form in a black hand is genuinely shocking, it's the last way you'd expect a black man in 1870's Germany (a mere ten years after American emancipation) to be presented.

There's a point in the exhibition where we see things start to lose their serene myth building. Where the subject and implicitly the viewer violently shifts. This is best seen in the way women become vampires and harpies having been the maidens and nymphs of a mythical bucolic past. Hindsight makes it tempting, and all too easy, to draw sociological and political conclusions but even if we avoid them it's clear that colour and form begin to change. There is a line of sinister, grotesque women that begins to appear with the symbolists. We see Lovis Corinth's slutty daubs and palate knived flesh and the bone pale temptress of Max Liebermann's 'Samson and Delilah' and, in both, women's skin itself seems toxic and dangerous, evidence of something hateful inside. This is where Max Slevogt's 'Frau Aventiture' is so revealing both thematically and the way paint restlessly clings to the canvass. The areas of pink and grey, flesh and steel, hard and soft just reinforces the idea of a conflict between male and female. What appears to be happening is unsure, a knight either lifting or strangling a naked woman, you can't help feeling it's the latter as it all takes place on a queasy green darkness. Without delving into the sexual politics it is both bravura and unpleasant.

It's probably not the done thing to express a pretty much blanket dislike for the many strands of German Expressionism. I've often thought that if anything were going to make an art movement impervious to criticism it was its censure by Adolf Hitler. This might be the root of my problem with the German strand of Expressionism. I understand the context and significance of Max Beckmann but more often than not his paintings descend into a caricature of neuroses on canvas. The twisted geometry and ugly decapitated proportions feel like a potent political cri de couer but are all angular aggression. It's hard to love these pictures even when, as in 'The Circus Carriage' Beckmann is creating and exposing his own personal mythology. Context can define the value of a political act, and Beckmann's defiance of Naziism through paint is inspirational, it can't determine aesthetic response.

My lack of sympathy for much expressionism comes from its inability to give a human access point to the work. The dark and light all comes in a flash in expressionism, and then another flash and a series of fireworks on top of one another until we're blinded. It's a sensational conceit but it suffers from a law of diminishing returns as the volume is constantly turned up to eleven. The work from the painters of 'Die Brücke' and the Expressionists here is often violently ugly. It often uses the clash of colour, and also of expectation of shape and colour, to to create a sensory disruption that has a psychological analogue. The effectiveness is undeniable but the sheer boldness make the works one dimensional. Whether these are the response to a violent world or the expression of an assaulted psyche or otherwise doesn't really matter, they seem to take a single emotional dimension at the expense of subtlety or ambiguity. That heavy handedness can be seen here in work by Emil Nolde and Franz Marc and it's as alienating as any Brechtian technique. This is in sharp contrast to works by artists such as Egon Schiele who captured no less angst and shock but retain their effectiveness because they're shown in concert with the brittle frailty of people.

There are two different stories at play in 'European Masters'. In one there is the battle for the visual identity of a nation, the discovery and rejection of a mythology. The second only just begins in the final room. It shows how the early Twentieth Century was less a crossroads for art and more a spawning ground. Multiple avant gardes and modernisms spring from it, the battle becoming one for self-expression rather than a single path or movement. All through this show there are works of power and beauty: August Macke's 'Naked girl with Headscarf', Kirchner's 'Reclining Woman in White Chemise' or Ferdinand Hodler's 'Childhood' all have the power to move. As an exhibition this challenges and enlightens which is in itself a fine thing, that much of the work might not be to my taste doesn't really matter and I'm simply glad the NGV have tried to tell an important story.