Thursday, December 22, 2016

German Modernism of the 1920s

Kurt Schwitters
Merz 1925 1. (Relief in the Blue Square)
1925
assemblage and oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Kurt Schwitters
Merzbild Kijkduin
1923
assemblage and oil on cardboard
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Kurt Schwitters
Entrance Ticket (Mz 456)
1922
collage on paper
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

"Abstractions have reached the level of facticity. Financial markets, national sovereignty, the corporation as individual under the law, international airspace, property rights: all are interwoven, ephemeral constellations that delineate the rights of the citizen subject, the conditions of the social contract, and the character of lived 'reality'. ... The modernist transformation from the tangible to the intangible, from the object to the image, the haptic to the visual, is only half the contemporary equation. With the passing of the last century and a half, these abstractions have been naturalized, entrenched and built upon to such a degree that they have the quality of concreteness and stability. It makes no sense to claim that either is more 'real' or 'fictional' than the other. These have always been false oppositions; the actual circumstance is far less discrete. After all, the solidity of objects is as much an abstraction of the social systems that produced them as the social systems are abstractions of these objects: the cumulative effect of both is a kind of capitalist realism."

 Walead Beshty quoted in Chance, published in the series, Documents of Contemporary Art by MIT Press in 2010

Oskar Schlemmer
Formation Tri-partition
1926
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Emil Nolde
Autumn Evening
1924
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Otto Müller
Two nudes in landscape
ca. 1922
oil on burlap
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Karl Hubbuch
Twice Hilda II
ca. 1929
oil on canvas mounted on masonite
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Christian Schad
Portrait of Dr Haustein
1928
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Chrsitian Schad
Maria and Annunziata 'from the Harbour'
1923
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Max Ernst
Untitled Dada
ca. 1922-23
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Max Ernst
Flower-Shell
1927
oil on canvas with grattage
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Gabriele Münter
Murnau in May
1924
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

Rudolf Schlichter
Portrait of an Oriental Journalist
ca. 1923-24
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid


Otto Dix
Portrait of Hugo Erfurth with Dog
1926
tempera & oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

I am grateful to Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza for the excellent reproductions.