"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.