OLD REBELS IN THE NEW WORLD...

“Others may become accustomed to these times ... but I ... a torn sea. I in the midst of the storm, I the mirror of the outside, as wild and chaotic as the world.” -- GEORG HEYM They were the young rebels of 1910, “a troupe of prodigal sons on the run,” howling in their flight from a world in which nothing seemed right any more. With their brushes and paint tubes and wild, pounding words, they set out against the paralyzing order of a German Empire which, on the surface, was functioning triumphantly well. Their country had not only won its war against France but, thanks to the opposition of the left, also could boast the most progressive social security of the era. And yet they felt they were suffocating. Germany was becoming a powerful industrial nation, but in her explosive cities her people were turning into the loneliest of crowds.

The painters and poets, composers, playwrights, gallery owners, publishers and editors who made up the Expressionist movement looked about them and saw the “madness of the big city where in the evening a crippled tree juts against a black wall.” Convinced that “everything is hollow and a death mask, broken, and nothing is inside,” they rebelled against empty conventions, aggressive materialism, against the entire capitalist world order of their fathers--while searching for a new world and a new human ideal in the brotherly revolution of the spirit.

In Dresden, in 1906, the founding manifesto of a group of artists known as “Die Bruecke” (“The Bridge”) called upon the new generation, the carrier of the future, “to seize freedom and lift a strong arm against the entrenched older powers.” As artists, the members of “Die Bruecke” were urged “to depict directly and without distortion what drives them to create.” In 1908, there followed the “Blue Rider,” a group of artists in Munich, of whom the gentle painter Franz Marc wrote: “We fight as savages against an old organized power.” By 1909, new literary circles were emerging in Berlin. In short, throughout Germany a fruitful interaction was under way between painters and writers, an interaction that revived the old traditions of woodcut and printmaking and took inspiration from the art of children and primitives as well as the insane.

The high-water mark of Expressionism came after Germany’s defeat in World War I when an entire generation of artists and writers, their youth sacrificed in the “slaughterhouse of Europe,” believed, for a brief historical moment, that their cultural rebellion might mature into a political revolution. In the end, Expressionism was to remain a revolution of the spirit. But whether depicting the hell of war or “the face of the ruling class,” these artists gave expression to truths whose political potential remains explosive to this day.

Although it was no longer active as an artistic movement, Expressionism became highly controversial in the 1930s and seemed doomed to be crushed between communism and Nazism. In 1937, a dogmatic group of German Communists in exile in Moscow blamed the Expressionists for having helped prepare the ground for fascism. Within the year, the failed painter Adolf Hitler, now Reichskanzler, staged his great retribution against the “degenerate art of the Jewish cultural Bolsheviks.” A number of Expressionist artists were murdered in concentration camps; others went into exile, and still others withdrew from public life into what came to be called Germany’s “inner emigration.”

Many paintings were lost to the cellars of the Gestapo; others were destroyed during the war; a large number were sold abroad.

After World War II, in a country that had destroyed itself as well as others, a generation grew up which had no models and only contempt for heroes. As for the older generation, it kept silent, concentrating relentlessly on the pursuit of the “economic miracle.” It was not until the 1960s--in fact not until the late 1960s--that we younger Germans rediscovered the Expressionists, artists who spoke to us with such amazing directness, artists in whom we were able to recognize our own ideas. Two world wars and half a century later, these were the people with whom we wanted to discuss once more all the great questions of society and politics, life and art. “Let Imagination Rule” was the slogan of the German students in 1968. It was an Expressionist slogan--and an Expressionist moment.

Robert Gore Rifkind discovered the German Expressionists in the 1950s while studying at Harvard. But since no one explained this world of pictures to him, he forgot about them. Later, as a young lawyer in Los Angeles, he began collecting modern French art. It was not until a fateful day in the summer of 1968--the same year, ironically, in which Germany was rediscovering Expressionism--that Rifkind encountered the pensive, dreamlike figures of Paul Klee in the Pasadena Museum of Art and then found and read Bernard S. Myers’ basic book about the Expressionist movement. That day, the collector recalls today with a certain pathos, would change his life. A man who had taken a rational, cerebral approach to life, he found in this form of art--crying as it does from the depths of the soul--a lifelong obsession.

Rifkind was methodical about his new passion, reading all the available publications, mulling them over during sleepless nights--and then buying, and buying again. The compulsion to build up his own collection proved stronger than all the reservations that he as an American Jew who grew up during World War II might have had about Germany. In 1972 he traveled to the Federal Republic and to Switzerland, visiting auctions and entering into a frenzy of enthusiasm: “We bought and we bought and we bought.” The results after 10 years of collecting are the 5,000 prints and drawings and the 4,500 books which today form the core of the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection.

In 1983 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art took over the collection. In 1987 a 2,800-square-foot center for German Expressionist studies opened in the museum. And now, in 1990, comes this catalogue of the collection with its richly printed companion volume of essays.

In 830 pages, the catalogue, compiled by Bruce Davis, depicts more than 5,000 works, listing them alphabetically by artist and including title, size, medium, provenance, signature, etc.

The amount of information tabulated is nothing short of prodigious, and yet it must be noted that the catalogue is occasionally complete at the expense of coherence. Thus, even considering the Expressionist movement in its broadest sense, as this catalogue does, it remains unclear why a lithograph by Toulouse Lautrec from the year 1895 is included, not to speak of the Art Nouveau nymphs of Wilhelm Volz (1855-1901) or of etchings done in the academy style of the 1890s by Sion Wenbach from Cincinnati (1818-1897).

But such blemishes and undeclared intentions aside, the wealth of this collection shines forth even in reduced-size catalogue reproductions. We see much, and we guess more than we can see. It is not only that Rifkind collected with surprising completeness the graphic works of the great masters like Ernst Barlach, Lovis Corinth (actually an Impressionist), Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ludwig Meidner, Otto Mueller and Max Pechstein all the way to the graphic artist Heinrich Zille (a great social critic and caricaturist, if never an Expressionist). The collection also provides an impression of the diversity and the sheer extent of the movement by presenting a large number of “unknown” artists.

It is not quite clear for whom the essays of the companion volume, edited by Karen Jacobson, have been written. If they aim at a generally interested public, such helpful aids as chronological tables, biographies and representative texts should have been included. If, however, they are written for scholars, then lengthy introductions summarizing the state of current scholarship without challenging it are superfluous. A more important question is whether this volume serves the needs of art historians alone or also those of students of Expressionism as a literary movement.

Regrettably, the former seems to be the case. The fascinating interactions between Expressionist writers and artists are documented only with a few illustrated book titles. If Rifkind, even allowing for his penchant for the superlative, can assert that “the collaboration between artists and writers produced some of the greatest artistic-political-social publications ever created,” then why have the writers been omitted? Why is there no comment on the interaction between such artist-writer pairs as Georg Heym and E. L. Kirchner, George Grosz and Walter Mehring or Georg Trakl and Alfred Kubin? If no other text were included, one might have hoped at least for Jacob van Hoddis’ poem “Weltende” (“End of the World”), perhaps the single most important, foundational poem of literary Expressionism. Here, its title is mentioned, but not a line of it is quoted.

In his “Reflections on 35 Years of Collecting Art,” Robert Rifkind is anything but modest. Having postulated that German Expressionism is one of the two great movements of 20th Century art (Abstract Expressionism being the other) and that the graphic work of the Expressionists is superior to their paintings and sculpture, he proceeds to argue syllogistically:

Major: Expressionism is the greatest (or at least tied for greatest) art movement of the 20th Century.

Minor: The Rifkind collection is the world’s greatest collection of German Expressionist prints and drawings.

Conclusion: Therefore, Robert Gore Rifkind is the world’s greatest 20th-Century collector.

Excusable hyperbole aside, Rifkind has much of which to boast. I was impressed time and time again by the diligence and hard work that went into the collecting, sorting, cataloguing of the collection, not to speak of the editing and design that have gone into the volumes that document the collection. And yet because of the very perfection and over-sized sumptuousness of the catalogue, a certain sadness creeps in. No doubt, Expressionism has become a hallowed artistic movement, a good investment for collectors, the proper pride of a museum and a broad and rewarding field for scholars. But whom did the Expressionists originally want to reach? Collectors? Curators? Scholars? Does art belong only to those who can afford to pay for it, or only to those properly educated to study it?

The Expressionists showed solidarity with the poor and the repressed, with beggars and Gypsies. They painted and acted against war, the military and the death penalty. They asserted their freedom of expression against a ruling class that threatened them with fines and imprisonment. Robert Rifkind notes that Expressionism excelled in social critique, and he complains that today’s artists reject this task. But neither he nor any of the other serious scholars ever asks just what the art and the social critique of the Expressionist past could have to say to the reality of today’s America. The Rifkind Center, says Earl A. Powell, has a program for distinguished scholars in residence to come to Los Angeles. Has he ever thought of inviting in a homeless painter from the streets of Los Angeles? No gesture would be truer to the spirit of Expressionism.

“I go and look all over for a town where an angel waits outside the gate. I carry his great heavy wing, the fractured one upon my shoulder blade, and on my forehead as a seal his star,” wrote the German Expressionist artist Else Lasker-Schueler in 1917.

The city of the Angels houses a great treasure in the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. This treasure carries with it, however, a legacy of rebellion. Germany--so often and so rightly exhorted to remember--must urge Los Angeles not to forget.