Modern Furies at Galerie St. Etienne

As the centennial of the commencement of World War I approaches, Galerie St. Etienne has commemorated this anniversary with a show of works created by German artists who served in the conflict.  That these are almost all graphic works - etchings, lithographs and drawings - is significant.  Monochrome pieces serve much better here than paintings in detailing the grisly carnage of trench warfare.  They possess an immediacy and intensity that could not otherwise have been captured.  There is nothing contemplative about them; they have instead a roughness that at once brings the brutality of the conflict home to the viewer.

The artist most thoroughly represented at the exhibit is Otto Dix.  This is only fitting as Dix was the only major German artist to have served in the trenches through the entire length of the conflict.  Those who are familiar with the artist primarily through the scathing portraits he completed during the Weimar period will find new insight in the drawings and etchings shown here.  Though stylistically far different from much of Dix' postwar work - View of the Moon (1916) and Troops (1918) are almost abstractions - they provide the basis for the savage irony that would inform such later masterpieces as the famous Metropolis triptych (1928).  Nor did the artist ever forget what he had witnessed.  His 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted the decomposing bodies of dead soldiers, caused such a scandal that it forced the resignation of the director of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum who had already hidden the work behind a curtain.  That piece is prefigured here by Dead Soldier (1922).  Other wrenching works by Dix (all of them from 1924) at the current exhibit include Wounded Man Fleeing, The Madwoman of Sainte-Marie-à-Py, House Destroyed by Aerial Bombs (Tournai) and Soldier and Nun (Rape).  

That other great satirist of the Weimar era, George Grosz, is represented by six works of which the most interesting is The Photographer (1927-28) which was actually a set design for a stage production of The Good Soldier Schwejk based on the unfinished novel by Jaroslav Hašek.  Max Beckmann is represented by four works, two of which - Large Operation (1914) and Morgue (1922) - depict the front line hospitals where the wounded and dead were brought.  There are four works on display by Egon Schiele, but these are primarily portraits of the commanding officers who protected Schiele and kept him from being sent to the front.  Other artists shown include Erich Heckel and Käthe Kollwitz.

In these days when there is once again saber rattling and the massing of troops along the Ukrainian border, this is a most timely exhibit.  As the viewer gazes upon the horror and folly of war that is portrayed so well by these artists, it becomes all too readily apparent that no lessons at all have been learned over the past hundred years.  

The exhibit continues through April 12, 2014.