New Light on Weimar - Weimar, Germany

Art in America, July, 1999 by David Galloway

Thus, the New Museum could open on Jan. 1, 1999, as the inaugural event of Weimar's jubilee year. While renovations were under way, Maenz continued to refine and expand his collection. He also encouraged artist friends--including Sol LeWitt, Pipilotti Rist and the late Donald Judd--to contribute to the total ensemble with permanent installations. Daniel Buren, for example, responded with a dramatic concept for the building's palatial double staircase. The left half was stripped of plaster to reveal the rose-colored brick filling of the walls, then "striped" with white masonry laths. The other half of the soaring space was covered with mirrors to continue the striped motif into infinity. The ensemble is certainly one of the French artist's most spectacular in situ works. Yet local hostility to such interventions in the town's historic substance has hardly faded: another Buren project, which would have transformed a decrepit residential square into a temporary sculptural environment, was overwhelmingly rejected by outraged citizens.

For the first time since the state of Thuringia issued its antimodernist "Decree against Negro Culture for the Protection of German Folklore" in 1930, the New Museum today confronts Weimar with the artistic positions of the international avantgarde. Minimalism and Arte Povera offer the strongest examples, but the pictograms of Keith Haring, the sculptural quotations of Giulio Paolini and the appropriations of Elaine Sturtevant offer salient counterpoints. With chilling appropriateness, an entire room has been devoted to paintings and lead sculptures by Anseim Kiefer, sine qua non of German artists, whose explorations of the traumas of history assume painful immediacy here. The proximity to the Gauforum alone would suffice to deepen the tormented shadows that hang over Kiefer's entire oeuvre.

The labyrinthine tutus of Weimar's recent cultural past were highlighted in a three-part, multisite exhibition titled "Rise and Fall of the Modern: Weimar, a German Example 1890-1990." The first part, mounted among the splendors of the Castle Museum, features works by such modernist masters as Cezanne, Renoir, Klee, Feininger and Kandinsky. Thanks to an early, brilliantly eccentric general director of Weimar museums named Harry Graf Kessler, who took up his post here in 1903, such pioneers were promptly and prophetically integrated into local collections. But Count Kessler reckoned without the entrenched conservatism of local burghers, who were incensed by the excesses of "decadent perverts" like Paul Gauguin. Though Kessler was not literally tarred and feathered, the acceptance of nude drawings by Auguste Rodin as a gift to the city brought his three-year stint to an abrupt conclusion. The Nazi dictatorship purged what remained of his far-sighted achievement.

The esthetic with which the Nazi overlords "corrected" Kessler's excesses is suggested in the exhibition's second part, shown at the Gauforum assembly hall, which presents art works acquired by Hitler, primarily to decorate his own official quarters. Some 200 paintings conforming to the artistic and ideological taste of the Fuhrer--visions of bosomy blonde nudes, tautly muscled athletes, blue-eyed farmers and romantic landscapes--are on view in one of the few large-scale showings of so-called Nazi art to take place in Germany since 1945. Nothing has been done to tidy up the raw spaces of the assembly hall, which the Communists converted into a factory. The canvases themselves are crowded together on temporary chipboard walls, as though relegated to a storeroom for museum castoffs. The anti-esthetic of the presentation and the technically versed but vapid canvases mutely underscore Hannah Arendt's theory of the "banality of evil."