"In fantastic company"
What
are human beings made of? In the Kunsthalle Tübingen, the exhibition
Man in the Middle – Menschenbilder is showing 20th-century artistic
images of human beings from the Deutsche Bank Collection; from Sept. 13
– Nov. 2, 2003
In the fall of 1912,
Constantin Brancusi,
Marcel Duchamp, and
Fernand Leger visited the aviation salon in Paris' Grand Palais. Suddenly,
Duchamp said to Brancusi: "Painting has reached its end. Who can make
anything better than this propeller here? Can you?" In view of all those
new shiny cars, airplanes, and machines – what more could an artist say?
What meaning did a single human being still have? How could he compete
with the beauty and utility of the machine? The First World War, which
broke out only two years later, was to show that these machines were not
only beautiful; they were also deadly.

Karl Hofer, Arbeitslose, 1932, Deutsche Bank Collection
War proved unable to eradicate the individual, even if, for a painter like
George Grosz, the human being was only conceivable as a "collectivist,
almost mechanical idea." The five unemployed in
Karl Hofer's painting of the same title, for instance, might be connected
by a similar fate. Yet if one looks more closely, it becomes clear that
each of them is gazing absent-mindedly in a different direction. Even in
the group, each person remains alone – a single individual with his own
fate and his own thoughts. Erich Heckel for instance, who had
volunteered for the Red Cross, drew a single dead soldier in Flanders as
an example for a lonely death amid the masses. A footprint can be seen
next to his face with the distorted mouth – as though someone had walked
past the dead man without even so much as stopping.
Or take a
look at
Max Pechstein's Große Mühlgrabenbrücke. Pechstein
made the painting in 1921 in the village of Leba in Pomerania, where he
spent the summer. The village is there, empty. Only a single person can
be seen on the country road. The figure's isolation might have reflected
Pechstein's own personal situation. As a member of
Die Brücke, he had turned against the traditional painting style
of the academies. Yet he left Die Brücke again as early as 1912 because
he found their decision only to show together to be a limitation.
Following a trip to the Palau Islands in the South Pacific and a year on
the front, he founded, together with
Erich Mendelsohn and
Rudolf Belling, the artists' association
"Novembergruppe" in 1918, which identified politically with the
November Revolution and wanted to take these impulses and carry them into
the field of art. But he left this group as well, in 1920. In 1933,
Pechstein found himself in a "group" once again: he was one of the many
artists whose works were defamed by the National Socialists. In 1937,
his works, as were those by
Schmidt-Rottluff,
Kirchner,
Beckmann, and many others, were derided in the Munich exhibition
Entartete Kunst.
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Max Pechstein, Große
Mühlgrabenbrücke - Leba/Hinterpommern, 1921
Deutsche Bank Collection
Although he was an open
advocate of the National Socialists,
Emil Nolde also fell victim to the ban. Nolde's humorously drawn female
figures with pointy noses and formless bodies, for instance, as he drew
them in his Fantasy from 1931, was taken as an opportunity to
accuse him of racial degeneration. In 1933, Nolde was excluded from the
Prussian Academy, and in 1941 he was prohibited from painting altogether.
With approximately a hundred drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs
from the Deutsche Bank Collection, the exhibition
Man in the Middle – Menschenbilder, which had previously been
seen in St. Petersburg and in Bremen, documents the ever-changing human
image from modernism up to the present day. The broad spectrum of artistic
positions introduced in the rooms of the Kunsthalle Tübingen beginning on
September 13 provides an insight into an era that, more than any other
before it, has been marked both by collective visions and the struggle for
individual self-determination. Following the exhibition
A Century of Landscapes , which had been touring throughout Germany
since 1999 and could last be seen in 2002 in the South African National
Gallery in Capetown, , as one of the thematic exhibitions of Deutsche
Bank's collection, concentrates on the artistic reinvention of the human
being in the 20th century as well as on the cultural transformations
reflected in its various images. In the process, it places special
emphasis on Classical Modernism.

Otto Dix, Großstadt (Entwurf zu Großstadttriptychon), 1926,
©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2002
Ranging from
representatives of German Expressionism, such as Ludwig Ernst Kirchner or
Max Beckmann – who called for a return to original, existential values in
their formal allegiance to the Primitive – to
Cornelia Schleime, who ironically inserted an image of herself into her
Stasi files (files kept by the East German secret police), thereby
introducing a new reflection into German history –
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