Books Received

available in English on modern German art, culture and history concentrates on the Nazi period, whereas little is known about the years preceding it. Actually the very opposite is true for the arts. While it is well known that the Nazis persecuted modern art as degenerate, the insipid classicism they put in its place has deservedly aroused only minor interest. Expressionist German painting, on the other hand,iswell represented in American collections and has generated a vast literatureof books and articles. Although, then, the basic subject matter of Eberle’s book is familiar to American readers, the author highlights the guiding themes and attitudes ofthe German postwar generation quite usefully by relating them to the war experience. One might assert that the American view of artists like Max Beckmann or Oskar Schlemmer focuses mostly on the characteristics of their pictorial style, their kinship with the French Fauves, the Italian Futurists or some of the abstractionists .The German art historian, on the other hand, turns our attention almost entirely to the symbolic interpretation of these works. This is particularly appropriate for the arts of the Weimar period, so heavily endowed with ideology. In fact, the weight of message and proclamation was sometimes out of proportion with the weakness of the actual vehicles, and some of that disproportion survives in Eberle’sanalyses. For example, when he concludes his book by drawing an elaborate comparison among one of Schlemmer’s relief figures a n d Michelangelo’s Adam and ancient representations of Prometheus, one might wonder whether Schlemmer’s fairly slim ornamentalism can afford to shoulder such a burden. The selection of Schlemmer as one of the four artists illustrating the thesis of the present book is least convincing. Although his attempts to re-establish an ideal of human perfection “by creating images of almost mathematical harmony” werecertainly enhanced by his abhorrence of the war, his work did not cope with the war experience itself. Otto Dix and Beckmann, on the other hand, had been subjected to the atrocities of combat, and George Grosz denounced the physical and moral collapse that had carried over to the civilian lifeof the German republic. Franz Marc and August Macke did not live to tell their war story during the years to which Eberle’s book is devoted. The central figure is clearly Max Beckmann-as “the greatest German painter of the twentieth century”, as Eberle convincingly calls him, he alone had the range, depth of mind and artistic power to deal with the apocalyptic catastrophe that shook the world when he was in his early thirties. He had shared with other German artists, writers and thinkers the hope that the hurricane of the war would cleanse European civilization of what they saw as the moral and cultural decay of a thriving middle class society. Physical combat was expected to bring about a welcome unfettering of submerged vital powers. Like Dix, Beckmann carried in his knapsack Nietzsche’s Joyous Sciencealongwith the Bible, but the Nietzschean illusion was soon enough refuted by the bestiality of what went on in the trenches. Beckmann, honest enough to recognize depravity in his own violence and sensuality, undertook to do penance by a martyrdom conceived on the image of the crucifixion. A powerful new mythology drawn from the brutal reality he saw around himself emerged as the supreme achievement of his art.The beginnings of thisdevelopment are sensitivelyanalyzed in Eberle’schapter on Beckmann. What isremarkableabout theferocious chronicle is the almost total absence of political awareness in both the author and the artists he discusses in his book. It is difficult to tell any part of the story of World War I and its aftermath without looking into the social mechanisms that generated it. But even George Grosz, the antimilitarist, saw the heroes, profiteers and victims of war mainly through their mere ugliness. In spite of the ample ideologies pervading the republic, those dramaticyears wereexperienced essentially as a battle of emotions. BOOKS RECEIVED Artist Biographies Master Index (First Edition, Gale Biographical Index Series, No. 9). Barbara McNeil, ed. Gale Research Co., Detroit, MI, U.S.A., 1986. 700 pp. Trade, $80.00. ISBN: 0810321076. Artists‘ Books: A CriticalAnthology andSourcebook. Joan Lyons,ed. Peregrine...