Kirchner and Pousette-Dart in New York

The road from Expressionism to Abstraction

ROBERT ZALLER

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) is the seminal figure of German Expressionism, and the 11 street scene paintings of Berlin he executed between 1913 and 1915 in many ways constitute the core of his oeuvre. Neue Galerie has organized its late summer show around one such scene, which features two of Kirchner’s favorite models, Erna and Gerda Schilling, as plume-hatted prostitutes among the Berlin bourgeoisie.

No one is certainly looking at them— the one figure who perhaps does has his back to us, and the only other face we see clearly (who may represent Kirchner himself) is averted from them— but their presence dominates the scene, and the horse-drawn carriage behind them implies the powerful male response that gives the painting its sexual charge.

German art’s three major movements

A show of all the Berlin street scene works would be a dazzlement; a show of one, with sketches and complementary works, would be instructive. But, unlike Neue Galerie’s recent “Van Gogh and Expressionism,” there’s no strong theme or thesis to this exhibit; rather, the recent restoration of this Kirchner serves as a happy excuse for the Galerie to trot out some of its treasures, and others in private hands, that sample the three major movements of early-20th-Century German art.

Kirchner— who has several works in this show but hardly dominates it— was, of course, the star personality of Die Brucke (“The Bridge”), the artists’ movement founded in 1905. But the other movements receive more or less equal attention here, and it is the Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky who arguably steals the show. This is because of a rarely seen 1911 masterwork, Araber II (Arabs II), which reveals Kandinsky on the very verge of his plunge into abstraction, with what are still nominally representative figures being swept up into wing- and wave-like forms suggesting an altogether new kind of pictorial dynamism.

In the adjoining hallway are two Kandinsky watercolors, respectively from 1912 and 1913, in which this movement is completely realized. In the first of these works particularly, Study for Deluge II, the now fully abstracted forms float, freely migratory, in a field in which space and form reciprocally shape each other, and the picture flows almost cinematically.

Pousette-Dart: Competitive but unaggressive

Although Kandinsky worked alongside the Expressionists, none of his colleagues followed him into abstraction, and one would be hard pressed to name a significant abstract German painter apart from Hans Hartung. Kandinsky’s legacy would have to wait until a generation of American artists picked it up in the 1940s and 1950s and made Abstract Expressionism the signature style of the American century. By happy coincidence, the representative of that school whose aims and sensibility most nearly approach Kandinsky’s own, Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992), has a show of his own going a few steps away at the Guggenheim.

A friend of mine once played tennis with Pousette-Dart and found him extremely competitive. It’s an interesting observation about a man whose works, though charged with presence, are singularly unaggressive. This very lack of aggression makes him so difficult to place in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, with its take-no-prisoners approach.

Pousette-Dart showed his gifts early, and, like his compeers, proceeded in rapid sequence through Cubism, totemic primitivism and biomorphism before finding full-fledged abstraction. The Guggenheim show is rather cursory about all this, although it has found two striking caryatids in the style of Modigliani, and three biomorphic works of the 1940s that constitute a kind of prophetic trilogy.

The shock of the bomb

The first of these, Undulation (1942-43), is a surge of terrific white energy through what looks like a long forcing-tube, suggesting (among other things) the increasingly ominous alliance of science and warfare. Cruciform, Comprehension of the Atom (1944), with the white explosion that caps the powerful columnar form that dominates the painting, seems in retrospect an uncanny anticipation of the Trinity atomic bomb test— a project at that point still a year off and, of course, then known only to a handful of people. Finally, The Atom, One World (1947-48) directly represents the mushroom cloud, by this time no longer a prophetic fantasy but the stuff of universal nightmare.

The shock of the bomb on the collective postwar psyche, and particularly on artistic consciousness, has never been adequately gauged, and Pousette-Dart would in some ways be a good place to start. The radical unrepresentability of the bomb (and, to some extent, its sister in evil, the Holocaust) gave American art of the late 1940s its final push into abstraction. Pousette-Dart was perhaps closer to it already than any of his colleagues. But the bulbous, poppy-like forms that populate his abstractions of the 1950s, with their suddenly bleached-out palettes, suggest a continuing reflection on the bomb and its implications.

Cramped by the Guggenheim’s renovation

By the early 1960s, Pousette-Dart had begun to paint the radiant, luminous works for which he is probably now best known, and which— with their blast forms, solar disks, and saturated color fields— seem an attempt to capture a sense of cosmic energy within a structure of deeply meditative, almost Buddhist thought. Such ambition is fraught with risk, of course. And some of these works, while they are never less than technically dazzling, can seem uncomfortably close to the clichés of science fiction art. But they are rescued by the painstaking sincerity and modesty of their quest, for Pousette-Dart’s sensibility, even in his most apparently grandiose conceptions, remains that of a supremely gifted and scrupulous miniaturist. As for the best of his work, it needs no apology whatever, for it is among the most striking American art produced in the latter half of the 20th Century.

The Guggenheim itself, which is undergoing major renovation, has tucked this show into the off-ramp wings on its fourth floor, while the rest of the museum (preparing for an exhibit of Richard Prince) remains eerily empty. In some ways, the stark backdrop, as of a ruined shell, underscores the more apocalyptic aspects of Pousette-Dart’s work. But the galleries do cramp him, and it’s a pity that the central atrium was unavailable: This time, for once, and with this artist, it would have worked to good effect. With the Guggenheim’s unrivaled trove of Kandinskys, a thoughtful show setting the Russian master side by side with his idiosyncratic American heir might yield some interesting insights into the work of both men. Just a thought.