Vagabond

Hard Reality in 1920s Germany

Mama
Doesn’t have an inkling
That I’m working in a Nightclub
In a pair of Lacy pants.
So please, sir,
If you run into my Mama,
Don’t reveal my indiscretion,
Give a working girl a chance…

You can tell my Papa, that’s all right,
’Cause he comes in here every night,
But don’t tell Mama what you saw!

— by Fred Ebb, from Cabaret

By Jerry Tallmer

So sings Sally Bowles in her pair of lacy pants in the Kit Kat Club in late-1920s Berlin, just as the Brownshirts are smashing faces in the streets, but the real nightclub where a Sally Bowles might be cozying up of an evening to a whole spectrum of bankers, lawyers, bureaucrats, artists, writers, poets, aristos, war profiteers, hangers-on, and sexual mix-and-matches of every stripe was Berlin’s Romanisches Café, a successor to the same city’s pre-1915 Café des Westens, better known as Café Megalomania.

There at the Romanische you wouldn’t have seen Toulouse Lautrec crayon in hand — wrong century, wrong country — but you might have spotted a Max Beckman or a George Grosz or an Otto Dix or some other pen-and-brush practitioner of Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit – the New Objectivity – committing to sketchpad some element of truth (Verism, they called it) about a particular chin, a jaw, an ear, a collar, a sleeve, a button, an eyebrow, a dress shirt, a cheekbone, a posture, a hipline, a cleavage, a hair style, a handkerchief, a hand like an angel’s or like a claw.

Elements, that is, almost of caricature – but not quite. Character-defining visual notes that -- in the chaotic era when the Weimar Republic is gasping its last, with Hitler pacing in the wings -- will feed into cold, hard, finished portraits like one, for instance, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of a certain squinty-eyed, foxy-faced Max Roesberg, standing stiffly in a confining, depressing dark green room in his too-tight dark blue suit, white wing collar, severe black necktie, a newspaper clutched in his hands for “casual” effect. It is this 1921-’22 oil painting by Otto Dix that 14 years ago set Sabine Rewald on track toward the show she has now curated, “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s,” a first-of-its-kind portrait display at the Met, November 14 of this year through February 18 of the next.

“When the Met bought this painting in 1992,” Ms. Sabine said in her office at the museum some weeks before the opening of the exhibit, “nothing was known about the sitter [the gentleman in the painting, who in fact is standing]. I wrote to all sorts of archives to find out who he was, where he lived, anything else. I got nowhere.

“Then in the spring of 1992 a brief item appeared in The New York Times, saying he was this Max Roesberg, a Dresden businessman who was part of a big family, some branches of which had immigrated to America.”

No sooner had that I.D. emerged than Sabine Rewald’s phone started ringing. Some of Max Roesberg’s American nieces and nephews wanted to see the portrait of their uncle. When they got to look at it, Ms. Rewald writes in an illuminating, fact-packed introduction to the exhibit catalogue, “they disliked [it] intensely, judging the figure to be wooden and the green background offensive. [They] also took a dim view of his characterization as a prosperous businessman because he was actually penniless. They were surprised to see the portrait they considered so unsuccessful [displayed in the Met] 60 years after it hung in Roesberg’s apartment.”

In short, they’d rather it wasn’t. But it was, and is.

What the Max Roesberg does not convey, Hitler or no Hitler, at least not to me, is fear – unlike the impact of another Otto Dix painting in this show (on loan from the Museum of Modern Art) that’s been scaring the hell out of me ever since I first got hit in the eye by it as a schoolboy in knickers, which is some years ago.

Dix and his fellow Verists liked, as noted above, to paint professional people – doctors, lawyers, professors, financiers – and the big scary MoMA-to-Met canvas in question is of a blimp-like, apple-cheeked Dr. Mayer Herrmann in his white medical gown, his posterior planted hugely on a small unseen stool, his eyes rolling whimsically up to heaven, a six-inch examining mirror strapped to his forehead concentrically echoed by a ten-times-larger circular mirror directly behind him. In this larger glass we discern what seems to be a load of human guts.

Somehow cycloptic Dr. Mayer Herrmann – who may be nothing more terrible than a dentist --always makes me think of Dr. Josef Mengele, the you-go-left, you-go-right Auschwitz Angel of Death, though anybody named Mayer Herrmann was probably Jewish and, for all I know, died at Auschwitz.

Otto Dix (1891-1960) was not Jewish, but Berlin-bred Sabina Rewald, who is Jewish – her father was the great art historian and Cezanne explicator John Rewald – tells us that Dix “liked to paint Jews, not because they were Jewish but because he liked the types” and would exaggerate certain features to heighten the Semitic aspect. He also liked to paint starving poets, playwrights, prostitutes, dancers, lesbians, drug addicts (Anita Berber, in bright red, a compelling subject, was several of those things). “Most of Dix’s sitters [Ms. Rewald writes] understood that their portraits first and foremost would be Dixes and only second, if at all, likenesses. To sit for Dix they had to have nerve and enough humor to accept the artist’s savage distortions and forgive his embrace of ugliness in a direct challenge to the conventional concept of portraiture.”

In France they had Dada, crawling up out of the trenches of Verdun, in Germany they had Neue Sachlichkeit, but both modes – the scalding, nose-thumbing anti-art and the hard-reality icicle -- sprang from revulsion over the slaughterhouse of World War I (which had taken 5,000,000 Germany lives alone).

Dix, who runs all through the Met show, is only one of ten artists -- most of them pretty banged up themselves in WW I – whose talents speak again from the 40 paintings and 60 works on paper of “Glitter and Doom.” Two of the most interesting to me (because most familiar) are Max Beckman (1889-1950) and George Grosz (1893-1959), both of whom are in a parallel if somewhat more focused exhibit through November 25 at 57th Street’s Gallerie St. Etienne under the heading “More Than Coffee Was Served: Café Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Austria and Weimar Germany.”

Weimar, Weimar, Weimar, lost frenzy. Frozen moment. The gutter, as William L. Shirer put it, risen to power – even while Sally Bowles enamels her fingernails. Of the six remaining artists in “Glitter and Doom,” the one nearest in gestalt to Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret -- also of course to the Christopher Isherwood who went to Berlin in 1928 or 1929 looking for boys -- may be Christian Schad (1894-1982), a recording angel equally at home with high society or hookers. His 1927 painted-from-memory portrait of Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt in black tie, peaked hanky, hands in pockets, sandwiched between two all but naked sexual ambiguities, stares out at us in weird resemblance to no one so much as the Edward R. Murrow of “Goodnight, and Good Luck” and real life. Real life being what the Neue Sachlichkeit was all about, nicht wahr?

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