Summary

Written in clear prose, Wayne Andersen’s expansive text accounts for all of modern Germany’s major artists—the Impressionists Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, the Expressionists Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Max Pechstein, the post-World War I George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, and the less classifiable Max Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Oskar Kokoschka, and Frans Marc. Theater and cabaret life are treated in equal measure to the visual arts, with rich coverage of Ibsen’s Ghosts, Brecht’s The Jungle of Cities, and the prototype of modern filmmaking, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
     
Andersen assigns his challenging lines of attack to radical issues that established in Germany the essential first wave of twentieth-century avant-garde art and culture. Insisting that German art is masculine and prone to violence, he formulates a compelling explanation for how artists and defensive art critics convert violence into art as a pretense to mirroring society. He associates Lustmord (sex-murder) imagery in German art, theatre, and cabaret entertainment with the sexuality of war. He sees Germania’s primal barbarism in German painting infused with the rise of Germany’s Nacktkultur (nudist cults). A desensitizing nakedness replaces sublimated nudity. The innocent nakedness of youth offers an opportunity for cultural renewal and a symbol of physical power.

Wayne Andersen is the author of twelve books, including Manet: The Picnic and the Prostitute, and Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine. His first book, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost was a New York Times “Book of the Times.” His recent book, The Youth of Cézanne and Zola: Art and Literature in Paris, was acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as “The Best of the Best in non-fiction” published in 2003.

“An amazing book!”

—Richard Shiff, Director, Center for Studies in Modernism, University of Texas at Austin.

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Author Bio

Wayne Andersen is professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the 1950s while attending the University of California at Berkeley, he was an abstract expressionist painter and architectural designer in the San Francisco Bay area. He moved to New York in 1959 to undertake graduate studies in art history and archeology at Columbia. After completing his doctorate and spending a year as senior curator of the Walker Art Center, he spent two years in Paris before joining the Department of Architecture at MIT in 1965. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the firm he founded, Vesti Design International, carried out major architectural projects in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of nine books and many essays. He currently resides in Boston with his wife, the landscape historian Phyllis Andersen.