Come to the Cabaret: Magic Realism at Tate Modern

The Weimar Republic: Germany in the 1920s. Berlin's clubs and cabarets are teeming with life amid a remarkable cultural upsurge that sees the birth of the Bauhaus and masterpieces in the new medium of film like Metropolis and The Blue Angel. But as the nation struggles to pay reparations for World War I, hyperinflation renders millions penniless and violent extremism stalks a splintered democratic system, paving the way for the Nazis to seize power in 1933.

This, then, is the backdrop to Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33 at Tate Modern in London. Drawn largely from the George Economou Collection in Athens, this is a sweep through a swathe of German figurative painting and graphic works, featuring big names like Otto Dix and George Grosz but also plenty of artists you may scarcely have heard of. If you've seen Aftermath, the show at Tate Britain about British, French and German art in the wake of World War I, this exhibition will take you deeper into some of the developments in Germany at the time.

The term Magic Realism was coined by critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe the trend in art away from Expressionism (Magical Realism of the sort you get in Latin American literature came along a bit later). Features include an economy of line, a focus on surface details and a sense of the odd.

The realism in the first room of this show focuses on the magic of the circus. Dix's Lili, the Queen of the Air is one of a series of etchings from a portfolio of not only daredevil trapeze artists and tattooed ladies but also a balancing act culminating in a top-hatted dachshund.

There are acrobats, too, of course. The rubber-like features of The Acrobat Schulz V are by Albert Birkle, and this is the picture being used to advertise this show. In truth, it's probably the most memorable image on display here. Birkle painted Schulz numerous times, apparently fascinated by his range of facial expressions.

Not everyone in this line-up comes into the circus-freak category. Grosz's Married Couple couldn't be more German, or more bourgeois. There's a self-satisfied look, isn't there, on the face of the cigar-smoking husband.

But there are strange undercurrents in this society, such as an obsession with violent crime and death, In Grosz's Suicides, one man is hanging from a streetlight while another in the foreground has shot himself. Dix gives us a Lust Murder, while Rudolf Schlichter depicts himself, disturbingly, with two hanged women. Weimar Germany had to overcome the trauma of a war that left millions of dead and maimed, and it shows. An earlier work, from Dix's time serving on the Western Front, is a portrait of his commanding officer, Bruno Alexander Roscher. He looks a little bit like a South American military dictator. 

One of the most striking pictures here certainly seems to break the barriers of reality. Heinrich Maria Davringhausen's colourful portrait of the poet and art critic Theodor Däubler dates, astonishingly, from 1917. Däubler, whose writings included a mystical verse epic referenced in the cosmic signs of this enormous painting, was an important influence on artists associated with Magic Realism.

This is an exhibition that mostly gives us images of people, but Carl Grossberg's painting of the Rokin in Amsterdam just gives us the depopulated, brightly coloured and precisely delineated buildings and bridge across oddly smooth canal water. It's reminiscent of some of the early 20th-century cityscapes in America's Cool Modernism at the Ashmolean in Oxford this spring. Richard Biringer's dark and steamy painting of the Krupp Works, Engers am Rhein, though, doesn't have that clean American feel. You feel something is brewing.

Back to the portraits, though: Among the most striking is this enigmatic portrayal by Sergius Pauser, an Austrian who studied in Munich, of himself in carnival costume. The mask is the face of his wife.

Pauser may be relatively well-known in Austria, but he doesn't even run to a English-language Wikipedia entry. Others here are similarly obscure, such as Karl Otto Hy with a rather 1970s-looking portrait of Anna that was actually made in 1932. Schlichter pops back up too, with a portrait of his wife Elfriede as the Lady with Red Scarf in front of a rather eerie moonlit landscape, also with something of a 70s Athena-posterish feel to it.

A slightly more familiar name may be Jeanne Mammen, a rare female chronicler in pencil and watercolour of the life of the city. There are three of her works here in a section focusing on the cabaret. This is Brüderstrasse (Free Room): Doesn't look to be the most salubrious area, does it? There's definitely more on offer than just the room.

A rather more androgynous look comes from the Dancer (Beatrice Mariagraete) by Josef Eberz, another artist barely known outside the German-speaking world. Eberz tended to Expressionist works, was, like so many, declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, and died during World War II.

One last room takes us into the sphere of religious works, clearly influenced by the trauma of the Great War. Birkle -- painter of the Acrobat Schulz -- is the one who stands out here too, with a tortured Crucifixion that hardly seems to be by the same artist.

This is a surprising show that takes you into areas of German art that are likely to be largely unfamiliar. The Weimar Republic was a disturbed and troubled society, and ultimately a doomed one. But much worse was to come.

Practicalities

Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33 is on at Tate Modern on Bankside in London until July 14, 2019. Opening hours are daily from 1000 to 1800, extended to 2200 on Fridays and Saturdays. There's no charge for this five-room show, though that does mean you may have to put up with groups of tourists wandering round in a desultory fashion who aren't actually that much interested in the art of the Weimar Republic but are in Tate Modern because it costs nothing to get in....

Blackfriars on the Thameslink cross-London rail line and Southwark on the Jubilee Line Tube are the nearest stations to Tate Modern.   

Images

Otto Dix, Lili, the Queen of the Air (from Circus portfolio), 1922, The George Economou Collection. © The Estate of Otto Dix 2018
Albert Birkle, The Acrobat Schulz V, 1921, The George Economou Collection. © DACS, London 2018
George Grosz, A Married Couple, 1930, The George Economou Collection. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J. 2018
Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, The Poet Däubler, 1917, The George Economou Collection. © Renata Davringhausen
Sergius Pauser, Self-Portrait with Mask, 1926, The George Economou Collection. © Angela Pauser and Wolfgang Pauser
Jeanne Mammen, Brüderstrasse (Free Room), 1930, The George Economou Collection. © DACS, 2018
Josef Eberz, Dancer (Beatrice Mariagraete), 1923, The George Economou Collection