This spring, museum shows are big on the paradoxical — “degenerate art” that is uplifting, an artist who asks to be taken out of the picture, a “Turkish Slave” who was neither, and the Age of Chivalry revived, reinvented, reburied and revisited.
First up: the Neue Galerie’s newly opened — and thrilling — “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937.”
“We’re not doing just another show of expressionist art,” says curator Olaf Peters of the 60-odd works by George Grosz, Paul Klee and other revered artists who were reviled at that infamous exhibit in Munich. “We want people to see the art as it was presented at the time.”
Works were hung askew in dark and crowded galleries. Derogatory graffiti served for wall text. A gallery of abstract art was titled “The Insanity Room.”
Surprisingly, only 16 of the 112 artists held up to ridicule were Jewish. Most were non-Jewish German expressionists whose subjective distortions were branded the work of “diseased minds.”
Some 2 million spectators came, many to gape and jeer.
“The Nazis played on the ignorance of the average German,” Peters says. “Most of them had no idea what this art was about.”
Reverberations from the Nazi war on modernist art can be felt today. In 2012, police seized a cache of art from the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt. His father, Hildebrand, was one of the dealers authorized to sell confiscated art to foreign buyers.
“German museums have never recovered from the amputation of their modernist collections,” Peters says. “The Nazis claimed to be saving German culture, but they really did the opposite.”
Given what happened to freethinking German artists in the ’30s and ’40s, it’s not surprising that the next generation made a fetish of freedom. So it seems from “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010,” opening April 19 at the Museum of Modern Art. The title impishly suggests that Polke was elsewhere when artistic crimes were committed. He made art under LSD and worked with more weird materials than a medieval alchemist — including meteor dust and snail mucus.
Freedom may not be the creative elixir Polke thought it was, but he was witty, and viewers who can keep their balance will be in for a fun ride.
Come May 13, the Frick presents “The Poetry of Parmigianino’s ‘Schiava Turca.’ ” The painting, from 1533, is of a beautiful society woman, but somehow ended up with a title that means “Turkish Slave.” The Frick says someone mistook her fashionable doughnut-shaped headdress for a turban. The artist, whose name means “the little one from Parma,” usually painted his subjects with swan-like necks and other exaggerations. This time, he confined his mannerist tendencies to the lady’s long pointy fingers.
In the second half of the 19th century, a group of British Victorian painters tried to restore the spirituality they admired in the art of the Middle Ages. On May 20, the Metropolitan Museum pays tribute to their contribution in “The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy in British Art and Design.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and others conjured up a detailed, dreamlike world of knights and wan, alluring maidens. Then it was all buried by the impressionist revolution. But, as this exhibit will show, they left their DNA in such areas as symbolist painting, art nouveau decoration, and children’s book illustration.