It is most unusual to see an exhibition of older European Art in New Mexico, but a fabulous one has come to the Albuquerque Museum of Art. Two and a half years ago, Andrew Connors, Director of the Museum, got wind of the formation of the show and went to Germany to lobby for it.
Noting the dates that the show covers, you can see that it begins shortly before WW I and goes through the end of WW II. Though one cannot ignore the poignancy of the politics, the sheer quality of the art in the show is extraordinary. The works all come from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Berlin. Compared with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has 200,000 works of art, Berlin’s collection of 4,000 works is not large. However, judging by the 72 works they sent to Albuquerque, the collection is superb.
The exhibition opened at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and after the show closes in Albuquerque on January 4, 2026, it will go on to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I do recommend the catalog, which gives a fuller understanding of the period covered in the art, along with the background of each artist, accompanied by illustrations of remarkably high quality.
The exhibition here is installed in a totally comprehensible manner so that you can follow the periods and styles of the art. It gives emphasis to the politics while demonstrating the artistic achievements with some of the biggest names of the period.
In the Albuquerque venue, the show opens with a 1914 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) view of Berlin’s Belle-Alliance-Platz, later known as the Mehringplatz. At the center of the composition is the column that commemorates the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. By 1945, by the end of the bombing, only the column with the Goddess of Victory at the top remained.
In 1914, Kurt Gunther (1893-1955) painted the “Radio Enthusiast”. The sitter is wearing headphones to pick up foreign transmissions, as regular broadcasts only started in Germany 9 years later. The portrait brought back the image of a friend from my teenage years who was a ham radio operator, maybe minus the cigar. Gunther was a forerunner of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement that became the dominant style in reaction to German Expressionism and World War I, when everyone was sobering up to the realities of politics and the world.
In the section titled “Politics and War” is the George Grosz (1893-1959) “Pillars of Society” from 1926. I will leave it to you to find all the symbols of the coming Third Reich, such as the Swastika tie pin of the earless figure in the front with sword in hand.
The climax of the exhibition, as presented in Albuquerque, is a striking installation of two sculptures and a triptych.
The bronze on the left is by Georg Kolbe (1877-1947), called “Descending Man” (1939-40) and stands 7 feet high (without the pedestal). Commissioned by the City of Frankfurt am Main for a ring of statues in the city. It was in tribute to Hitler’s favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. I am fairly sure that he had Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” in mind. It was, of course, included in the 1940 edition of “The Great German Art Exhibition”. That took place every year from 1937 to 1944 to present the ideal of the Third Reich in contrast to the 1937 exhibition of “Degenerate Art”.
In the foreground is the bronze “Fallen Man” (1914-1916) by Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919) (see installation photo above). It was the artist’s response to the devastation of war, and soon after its creation, he committed suicide. In 1937, all his works were declared degenerate art and confiscated from German museum collections. It is in perfect contrast to Kolbe’s work and a foreshadowing of what was to come.
The work with the greatest impact of the show occupies the center of the installation, a painting by Horst Strempel (1904-1975) appropriately titled “Night Over Germany” (1945-1946). This stunning triptych with a predella repeats the tradition of an altarpiece.
With Germany totally defeated, Strempel dealt with its shame of the preceding decade plus. The catalog entry states, “In the central panel, the artist processed his own experience of the concentration camps’ barbarism. The left wing depicts civilians’ fear during the nights of bombing; the right shows the terror of a hidden Jewish family. Only the lower panel, showing the resistance in the underground, hints at a vague hope of liberation.” Standing before it today, one shares the experience of its first public exhibition in 1947 when observers agreed it was a masterpiece “whose accusation stirs, whose silence speaks”.
