Ten years ago museumgoers could scarcely escape large exhibitions on turn-of-the century Austrian art and culture.
Vienna, London, Paris, Venice, New York–they all had shows that presented paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs, furniture and, in one instance, even the uniform of Franz Ferdinand, the hapless archduke whose assassination brought about the carnage of World War I.
Austrian art, both luxurious and troubling, so enthralled viewers that a logical development would have been exhibitions to trace the fate of some of the creators between the world wars. But no such shows materialized during the last decade, and only now has one brought together a cross section from the more than 100 artists who between 1918 and 1940 left their native Austria for America.
“Emigrants and Exiles,” a collaboration between the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery at Northwestern University and the Osterreichische Gallery in Vienna, assembles for the first time works by 11 artists who were forced out of Austria to begin their careers again in an alien cultural environment.
Only three of the group–painter Max Oppenheimer, sculptor Anna Mahler and architect and stage designer Frederick Kiesler–will be even remotely familiar to Americans. The rest have just begun to re-emerge here and in the homeland that rejected them three-quarters of a century ago.
Interestingly, rediscovery has taken longer for visual artists than either writers or musicians. So the exhibition at the Block is a first step comparable to the remarkable Decca/London “Entartete Musik” series of recordings, begun in 1993, that reintroduced German, Austrian and Czech composers from the same inter-war period.
On those discs, as here, most of the figures were Jewish or had family members considered Jewish by National Socialist racial laws. But race was not the only issue behind the artists’ departures. They left Austria for various reasons, ranging from better career opportunities to safety for an African-American spouse who had been stoned on a street in Vienna.
None of the artists participated in anti-fascist activities or created pieces critical of the regime before coming to the United States. And not all their work was so daring as to be proclaimed by the Nazis “degenerate” and banned; in fact, the sculptures by Mahler and paintings by Viktor Hammer are deeply conservative.
All these disparities (and more) remain throughout the show, but each artist receives essentially the same treatment: works from before and during their exile plus, where appropriate, a selection of the different commercial art some produced to earn a living.
The exhibition presents, then, 11 separate developments for viewers to trace in a sweep of styles from early 20th Century Cubism to Surrealism, Magic Realism and mid-century Abstract Expressionism.
This involves a mass of material–including even Henry Koerner’s reportorial sketches for the Nuremburg Trials–that can be further broken down into work retaining its Austrian inflections and work departing from the artist’s past in handling or subject matter.
Oppenheimer, a friend of painter Egon Schiele who immersed himself in Viennese musical culture, is the show’s great example of an artist so sustained by memory that late in life he recalled works from a bygone era and painted them again with a touch reminiscent of his early Expressionist style.
From the evidence presented, Oppenheimer’s art was not at all affected by exile. The world he treated in paintings and prints is basically the Old World of his most famous subjects on view, composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni and the Roth Quartet, both exemplars of refinement in the halcyon days of European society prior to World War I.
Included is Oppenheimer’s famous portrait of Schiele–bald, with hands writhing–and “The Bleeding One,” a painting of an etiolated male nude that suggests the martyrdom of Oppenheimer himself, an artist thrice cursed in his homeland, for being a homosexual, a Jew and (according to painter Otto Kokoschka) a plagiarist. Still, America had little power over him, for he clung tenaciously to Austrian ideals, becoming the most poignant of the creators on view.
Wolfgang Paalen, a devotee of American Surrealism, is at the other extreme, a painter whose work immediately turned from Viennese sources toward an image-making that became ever more abstract and spectral. The wide-open spaces of America may have deepened in him a sense of limitless landscape. These plains were first the setting for his Surrealist bone-, bird- and sail-like forms, but they gradually dissolved into a flickering play of vectors and lines of force.
American painters Charles Burchfield and Arthur Dove were obsessed with the idea of a nature that teemed with hidden energies; and in an unusually dynamic painting on a panel of wood, Paalen evokes those energies as if they were patterns of iron filings in the field of a magnet. His small, quill-like strokes dart all over the panel with a force positively electric. Few of the Abstract Expressionist painters who came after him would activate a picture as strongly or as jazzily.
Between these poles is Erika Klien, the unacknowledged star of the exhibition who has not yet been closely examined by art historians. Her early works are unexpected and compelling, for Klien’s depictions of objects hurtling through space, as in the painting titled “Locomotive,” grew from the Futurist movement, which had many more adherents in Italy and France than in Austria.
At the same moment in the mid-1920s, she was also something of an abstract Symbolist, conjuring states such as loneliness through geometric forms as delicate in line as color. Klien had a decorative gift that served her well in designs for posters, including one for an exhibition of students from her classes at Manhattan’s New School of Social Research. Sometimes, too, she took on the view of a caricaturist, which lent sharpness to such otherwise fragile watercolors as her 1930 “Revolution in Vienna” and 1951 “Streetworker.”
Mahler, daughter of the composer Gustav, created orthodox portrait sculptures that gained attention even before she came to the United States and produced her sensitive head of composer Arnold Schoenberg. But Klien represents the case of an artist working in European avant-garde styles who could not possibly have risen in Austria to the status she achieved in America. Even at a time when native American painters reacted against European influences, Klien sustained herself here, succeeding as both a teacher and a practicing artist.
The conservative–and, likewise, self-sustaining–Hammer recognized that, had he not left Austria for the sake of his Jewish wife, his hard, gemlike art might have been enlisted in the glorification of Aryan ideals. That clean-scrubbed quality is not much in fashion today, which is a pity, for as his 1940 gold-leafed portrait of Countess Reventlow indicates, he was an artist strong in form and technical refinement.
Henry Koerner, on the other hand, blended his brilliant technique with effusions of feeling in a socially critical style that was cornball even at the height of its ’40s popularity. “The Lot” (1948-49), which depicts figures of different races in an abandoned automobile, is Koerner at his most sentimental. But late in exile, he married and started a family, achieving a sense of belonging that apparently caused the Magic Realism to drop away. Thereafter, as in his courtroom drawings, he again became an observer very much in control of authentic emotion.
Koerner’s achievement did not bring the same financial rewards as, say, Josef Binder’s advertising for Sucrets throat lozenges or Kiesler’s scenic design at the Juilliard School of Music. But such personal triumph does contribute to a feeling of artists having overcome tremendous odds that lightens what might otherwise seem a wrenching, even pervasively gloomy, show.
The exhibition provides enough surprises–Binder’s watercolors of a car trip across America were re-discovered only two months ago–that viewers need not dwell on artists who gained little from their American experience. Often we sense the eternal ache of the exile, but it is mostly dispelled by art that holds up better than anyone, including the creators, might have expected.
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THE FACTS
`Emigrants and Exiles’
When: Through June 16
Where: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, 1967 S. Campus Drive, Evanston
Admission: Free
Call: 847-491-4000
Related event: Chuck Kleinhans will give a free lecture on “the Films of Austrian-Born Directors, 1920s-1950s” at 6 p.m. Wednesday in NU’s Louis Hall
