The eyes of Käthe Kollwitz, black and hopeless, look at you like messengers of death from a lithograph the German artist made of herself in 1934. You don’t need much knowledge of modern history to guess why the socialist Kollwitz was in despair, a year after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. But is she really “making modernism”, as the title of this exhibition claims, in this confession of private anguish and political shock? Kollwitz’s self-portrait in her 60s is as timeless as Rembrandt’s as a broken old man.
Kollwitz is by far the greatest artist in this survey of seven women artists who worked in early 20th-century Germany. And she has almost nothing in common with her supposed peers. Some art leaps at you out of its own time. Other art stays in a lost place and moment, fascinating as history, important as a document – but it does not grab us. That’s true of a lot of the works here. Gabriele Münter depicts the Munich equivalent of Britain’s Bloomsbury set in paintings that capture middle-class avant garde life. She portrays her lover, the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, in shorts and sandals in her 1909-10 painting Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table, chatting to Bossi who’s also in this show. Meanwhile, in her 1903 etching Woman with Dead Child, Kollwitz portrays a lumpen naked body in pain, hunched over the infant corpse she grasps to her as if trying to shake it back to life.
I’d be less frustrated with this show if it had a more accurate title. Making Modernism suggests a more ambitious project than this turns out to be. Given that all the artists are women it even implies a revolutionary feminist rewrite of art history. In reality it’s a gathering of some fairly interesting figures from pre-first world war Germany, plus one genius, Kollwitz, who stands out like a raw wound.
Münter makes a poor feminist as she seems enthralled by the male artists alongside whom she worked, and not just Kandinsky. Her 1913 painting Man in an Armchair (Paul Klee) is a study of the artist who would evolve his own language of primeval cartoons. It’s anything but revolutionary: Klee sits stiffly in an interior whose intense hues and semi-abstract shapes would have looked pretty sedate even in 1913. This was, after all the year when Picasso’s cubist collages, Duchamp’s first readymade, and Epstein’s Rock Drill were taking modernism over a radical new precipice.
The movement most of these artists belong to, German expressionism, itself has an awkward place in the story of modernism. By 1916 younger Germans were rebelling against this painterly style saturated in echoes of Van Gogh and Matisse, repudiating its aestheticism by making brutal Dadaist collages. If you really want to vaunt the women of German modern art, shouldn’t you include the great Dadaist Hannah Höch?
By confining itself to a modern movement that already looked like old hat before the Great War began and was left irrelevant by its horrors, this exhibition renders its own argument insipid. Far from rejecting male perspectives, the artists here quote the “masters” of modernism so enthusiastically they raise fascinating questions about how knowing an artist’s gender changes our perceptions of an image. Female nudity preoccupies Modersohn-Becker and gives her unsettling potency.
Indeed she’s barely modernist at all. Modersohn-Becker’s sharply honest nudes have a German eye for the reality of life that goes back to the Reformation artist Cranach and was carried through into this century by Berlin-born Lucian Freud. In fact Freud did a painting of his daughter Esther breastfeeding that’s the spitting image of Modersohn-Becker’s lovely work, Baby Breastfeeding.
German modern art – and its British emigre offspring in the work of Freud and Frank Auerbach – is great precisely because it never did worry too much about being modernist or shiny-new. Expressionism, dada and later movements came and went, yet for all the experiments, artists kept their eyes on the old blunt themes of bodily existence, spiritual longings, life and death.
Of no artist here is that so true as Kollwitz. Her images are timeless in their pain. She shoves human suffering down your gullet with her engraver’s burin and sculptor’s chisel. In a stark woodcut print made in 1929 as German history tightened into its dead-end street, she depicts a mother and child sleeping, hugging for warmth and safety in the dark.
This exhibition misunderstands how women artists have been excluded from the canon. The art patriarchy never said women can’t be artists, but that they can’t be great artists. This show accidentally perpetuates that by treating Kollwitz, a true great, as just one of a crowd.
