“Glitter and Doom”

Christian Schad, detail of Self-Portrait,1927

Photograph: private collection, courtesy Galerie Brockstedt, Hamburg

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, through Feb 18

The Weimar Era: Is there another period of modern history that calls forth such immediate, visceral associations? The name itself has a racy, polluted ring. Even those with only the vaguest knowledge of the actual—chaotic, horrible—conditions in Germany between the wars, have a feel for the widespread decadence the era has come to represent. “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits of the 1920s” a remarkable show of Weimar art at the Met, does little to counter that perception. It is brutal, shocking and almost as audacious as its overwrought title suggests. Curator Sabine Rewald doesn’t shy away from the grotesque and coarse, nor from the salacious. The 100 paintings and drawings by ten artists portray cabaret performers, transvestites, cocaine addicts and gruesomely disfigured veterans. But there is more than social history at stake here, and the works on display are much too compelling in their own right to serve as mere artifacts.

“Glitter and Doom” is the first exhibition devoted to Verism, the progressive wing of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”), a realist painting movement that functioned as a retrenchment from the excesses of Expressionism. But it’s arguable whether the Verists were ever much of a “school” and a single aesthetic program is not especially evident in the show. Max Beckmann’s thick, stolid, painterly surfaces are a long way from Georg Grosz’s tricky, cartoonish skewings of perspective. Technique is less important here than attitude: A certain chilly gaze is what unites the artists. The Verists can be considered objective, not in the sense of some quasiscientific portrayal of reality, but simply as a result of their radical lack of sentimentality.

As if too impatient to be confined by any one style, Beckmann, Grosz, Otto Dix and the others used whatever means necessary to record their dark world. The works on display shift freely among representational modes, from  Old Master–style perfectionism to roughly exaggerated caricature. Satire is so generalized and omnidirectional that it’s often hard to tell what even counts as caricature. A painting like Grosz’s Eclipse of the Sun, a merciless allegory of a bloated, ineffectual President Hindenburg selling out Germany, uses grotesque deformations of the body in the service of political critique. But most of the works—Grosz’s included—are more oblique. It’s as if the corruption of society made its way directly into the physiognomy of the entire German population. Dix’s unsparing portrayals of prostitutes and the war wounded are powerful social reportage, but his paintings of friends and colleagues can be equally harsh.

Responsible for half the works in the show, Dix is clearly the star of “Glitter and Doom,” and he merits the attention, with a gimlet eye for detail and texture and endless fascination with the range of human ugliness. His 1921 painting of urologist Hans Koch depicts the doctor as both befuddled and menacing, brandishing a syringe and catheter, surrounded by the gleaming tools of his trade. It is one of the most sinister depictions of the medical profession ever created.

If Dix is the main attraction, then the lesser-known Christian Schad almost steals the spotlight. The Weimar portrayed in his mannered, mysteriously stilted paintings is iconic in its mix of seductiveness and degeneracy. Conservative in technique and self-consciously outrageous in content, they approach kitsch: Schad could be Grant Wood’s pervert doppelgänger. Yet they exert a hold on the viewer that extends beyond mere titillation. A 1927 self-portrait—the artist, posed in front of a nude, scarred woman, gazes blankly into space— is so forthright in its near-pornographic depiction, so confrontational, that it must make a statement of some kind. But any larger meaning is withheld: The painting is “about” the purple plaid sheets, the decadent black ribbon on the woman’s wrist, the artist’s delicate transparent green shirt. What you see is what you get. And that is the value and the unsettling power of all the works in “Glitter and Doom”: a denial of the exemplary, a constant refusal to go searching for meaning beyond the fabric of the particular.