I thought it was one of those random selections museums send on the road when they’re closed for renovations. Not at all, it was a re-examination of art in Europe a century ago from a German rather than the traditionally French perspective. There were incredible masterpieces from all over the world, and fascinatingly bad work. There was work by people I had never heard of. It was terrific.
The first discovery was Christian Rohlfs, whose Birch Forest of 1907 stopped me dead in my tracks. A first-rate Joan Mitchell produced eighteen years before she was born.
One of the oddities of the show was that the Getty’s brown ink drawing by Van Gogh, Arles, view from the wheatfields (1888) was 1000 times more moving and alive than any of the Van Gogh paintings on view.
The wall of Fauves was initially attractive but, on closer inspection, turned into a firing-line from which Matisse was the only survivor. His Open window at Collioure (1905) a century later seems as solid and stoutly constructed as a Georgian town house. In comparison, all the others—Vlaminck, Manguin, Dufy, Friesz, Braque, Derain, Van Dongen—even with all their undoubted dedication, cleverness and charm ... dissolve into a limp and lifeless prettiness.
Matisse's Studio Interior (1903-4) from the Tate, in the room cramed with calculated craziness seemed timid and conventional at first glance, but it held its ground.
The big novelty of this exhibit was discovering Erich Heckel. LACMA’s own Sand Diggers on the Tiber (1909) is heroic and moving. The utopia that didn’t happen. They also had his jaw-droppingly naughty Girl with Doll (1910) from the Neue Galerie. And what’s Heckel’s story. He lived till 1970?!
Among the Germans it’s Kandinsky who obviously dominates. His Arab Cemetery of 1909 (illustrated at the top of the page) now looks like the façade of a Greek temple. Similarly, a tiny watercolor by Klee leaps across a roomful of pointless shouting and gesturing.
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