The Art Scabs: Questions of the True
Accessibility of German Expressionist Prints

Margaret G. MacDonald

 

In a 1920 critique of Oskar Kokoschka published as "Der Kunstlump" ("The
Art Scab"), John Heartfield and George Grosz consider the effectiveness
of contemporary German art to enlighten the worker. They pose the
question: "[w]hat is the worker to do with the spirit of poets and
philosophers who, in the face of everything that constricts his life
breath, feel no duty to take up battle against the exploiters? Yes, what
is the worker to do with art?" (qtd. in Kaes 483-84). This antagonism to
modernist German art, voiced by artists who turned away from German
Expressionism to embrace other movements such as Dada and Neue
Sachlichkeit (see Robbins), exposes an essential flaw in the
Expressionist movement. Artists claimed themselves to be
"anti-bourgeois." As Erich Heckel reportedly stated, "Expressionism was
above all a protest: against the bourgeoisie, against aestheticising,
and against the dominant academic outlook" (qtd. in Sabarsky, qtd. in
Paret 31). Yet, in reality, as art historian Reinhold Heller writes in
"Confronting Contradictions: Artists and Their Institutions in
Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany," the Expressionists were bourgeois
artists attempting to "revise, overcome, and transcend the social and
institutional structures within which they worked" (18). But bound to
their position within society, the Expressionists confronted the
inherently bourgeois nature of their methods for distribution of the
image and yet could not prevail over them.

This problem of the Expressionists' inability to escape the
bourgeois society they disdained manifests itself in their hopes for and
dissemination of prints. Driven by their idealism and desire to
enlighten the masses through art, the Expressionists coveted the print
as an ideal medium because of its accessibility. Gustav Hartlaub, a
supporter of the Expressionist movement, for example, praised the print
in 1920 as "public and popular" and claimed that "[t]he print wants to
fly: a broad sheet fluttering downward from spiritual heights to a great
people with arms outstretched" (qtd. in Long 144). Prints, both
reproducible and mobile in nature, were believed to have a great ability
to transform society.

In another recent essay on the history of print cycles in German
art, Heller illuminates an irony in the nature of the print. He writes,
"[t]he image gained accessibility to a larger audience simultaneously
with its accentuation of private, personal, preserved, and separate
viewing and veneration. Broad popularity and restricted exclusivity thus
ironically were simultaneous products of the printing process..."
("Observations" 10). Accordingly, with its inherent reproducibility and
a requirement for close, private inspection, the print turns into the
perfectly consumable item.

The print portfolio became a method the Expressionists utilized
to spread enlightenment to a broad audience or, perhaps more accurately,
to distribute their works to the consumers. Typically, a print portfolio
contains a series of images that produce an overall theme when viewed in
sequence, as Robin Reisenfeld explains ("Revival" 19). In an essay in
The German Print Portfolio 1890-1930: Serials for a Private Sphere, she
expounds, "[f]requently turning to the serial print in their examination
of such diverse subjects as artistic life and war, religion and
economics, or love and politics, artists adopted the multiple image
format to articulate responses to the era's complex set of cultural,
social, and political issues" ("Revival" 20). She continues, "the cycles
allowed artists an expanded treatment of a particular theme, situation,
or idea" (20). Ideally, the combination of prints in such a series
provides a means to create a comprehensive statement, making the works
more powerful as a whole.

Many images in the current exhibition come from such portfolios,
though they have long since been framed separately. For example, Ernst
Barlach's lithograph from 1912, Der Blutflecken 2 (The Bloodspot 2, Fig.
19) comes from a portfolio of twenty-seven lithographs called Der tote
Tag (The Dead Day). This series of lithographs illustrated and
accompanied a play written by Barlach. The images tell the tragic story
of a mother driven crazy by the possibility of her son leaving after he
is called to serve God. In attempt to keep her son, she kills the
mythical horse, Herzhorn, whom God had sent to bring her son to Him. Der
Blutflecken 2 depicts the mother in her agony and guilt after she has
murdered Herzhorn. Eventually, her grief overcomes her and she commits
suicide (Carey and Griffiths 96-97). As a single image, Der Blutflecken
2 contains the visual appeal of expressive line work exaggerating the
mother's anxiety, but it lacks the potency created by placing it within
the context of the narrative series. The portfolio aspires to strengthen
communication between artist and viewer, but when the individual prints
are separated they sometimes lose their power.

According to Heller, "[t]he history of modern art in Germany is
a history of attempts to redefine the institutional component of arts'
communication process" ("Confronting" 18). Accepting this definition, we
see that the print portfolio provided a clear and more directed
communication between the artists and the consumer. This argument,
however, only partially explains the popularity of the print portfolio
for the Expressionists. One must also consider the economic factors
associated with prints. In his essay on the print cycle, Heller
explains, "[p]rints were a successful means of increasing their market
beyond local limitations, and thus, of generating increased patronage
and income for their work" ("Observations" 10). Reisenfeld discusses the
significance of this for the print portfolio, claiming that "the print
cycle constituted a semi-private sphere for its liberal bourgeois
audience. A product of the creative expression of the spirit, the print
portfolio was recognized by the new middle-class collector as the
artistic counterpart to his own freedom of material means" ("Revival"
31). Reisenfeld concludes that prints, cheap, reproducible, and
consumable, provided a path for the new emerging middle-class to
establish its position in society (29).

While the Expressionist print became "public and popular," as
Hartlaub wished, the contradictory nature of prints made the
Expressionists' "anti-bourgeois" aim unattainable. In reality, the
audience they hoped to reach had little access to the works. From her
analysis of the Brücke group's 1910 exhibition catalogue, Reisenfeld
determined the middle-class to be the primary consumers of their works.
She states, "Brücke's list of subscribers shows that many were located
socially and economically within one or the other defined subsets of
this new middle-class, which clearly functioned as an important patron
of German Expressionist graphics" (29). In her essay, "Supporters and
Collectors of Expressioism," Shulamith Behr, agreeing with Reisenfeld,
furthers her definition of the consumers of Expressionist works. She
writes, "...active in public and private life, the supporters of
Expressionism ranged from influential museum directors, professional
people, publishers, art historians, and critics to bankers, industrial
entrepreneurs, and businessmen" (46). In direct contradiction to the
type of viewer to whom the Expressionists claimed to direct their
images, the consumers of the Expressionist print, the middle-class,
became their actual audience.

If the viewer recognizes this contradiction in the practical
accessibility of Expressionists prints, works from our exhibition, such
as Conrad Felixmüller's etching, Arbeiterpaar (Ehepaar Schnabel) (Worker
Couple[Mr. And Mrs. Schnabel], Fig. 20), reveal a new irony. In
Arbeiterpaar, we find a portrait of the humble Schnabels. The room in
which they stand contains only the table, the chair on which the husband
rests, and a small light fixture that hangs from the ceiling. Their
stern expressions and the starkness of their surroundings reflect the
harsh realities of their proletarian life. As Behr writes in a
Felixmüller exhibition catalogue, this etching and others of similar
content by the artist ironically "held joint appeal for upper-middle
class businessmen and anti-bourgeois circles" (29). In terms of what we
know of the actual consumers of the Expressionist print, one questions
the intent of and reactions to this image. If both the artist and the
consumer come from the middle-class, does this art truly have anything
to do with the worker?

George Grosz's transfer lithograph Kein Hahn kräht nach ihnen
(Nobody Gives a Damn, Fig. 18) from the limited edition portfolio serial
Die Schaffenden (The Creators) becomes a bold and biting commentary on
the irony existing in Expressionist prints. Throughout the scene we find
depictions of fat, bourgeois men in top hats walking past and ignoring
the weeping woman and the prisoner who looks out pleadingly to the
viewer. As Grosz points out in his idiomatic title, "nobody gives a
damn" in this society. In viewing this image, one wonders if, in his
disgust with the ineffectiveness of the print to speak to the worker,
Grosz turned his criticism of the bourgeoisie directly to them, as they
were the actual consumers of his work. In doing so he may have abandoned
the aim to "revise, overcome, and transcend" his place in society, as
Heller puts it, and accept it to make his works more powerful.

While in "Der Kunstlump" Heartfield and Grosz define the
Expressionists' attempt to transcend the people as "a swindle! A
swindle!" (qtd. in Kaes 484), one cannot believe that the Expressionists
did not attempt to work beyond or against their social position at all.
Of Expressionist works, Heller establishes that: "Protected, though
precariously, by private ownership and withdrawn into the realm or
personal contemplation, the artworks were denied that role as public
critique and comment so determinedly intended for them by their creators
("Confronting" 17). The contradictions inherent in the print prevented
the prints' absolute accessibility. The Expressionist prints remained
inaccessible to much of their intended audience because the artists were
ultimately confined to the bourgeois society against which they had
hoped to revolt.