Photo used in editorial support for the book “Before the Fall” published by Prestel. (See Amazon.com book availability at the end of this article.)

BEFORE THE FALL,

German and Austrian Art of the 1930s

an Exhibition at Neue Gallerie, NYC

The reason the artworks in this article are tiny and impossible to see thumbprints, leaving you to visualize the art from their descriptions alone, is because these images are owned by various collectors and museums and are not available for “recognizable” reproduction.

DESCRIPTION: A snow-covered landscape shows the plowed rows of a farmers field along with a fence made of wire and wooden poles and a leafless isolated tree, all of these are on the left of the composition. The viewers eye is focused on a cluster of trees, some with leaves, in the absolute center of the painting, and more leafless trees define the horizon line. A gray overcast sky fills the top one-half of the composition. This desolate scene, depicts the cold, cold winter which has gripped the country-side.

DESCRIPTION: The point of view in this painting is from the middle of a dense forest, surrounded by the trunks of leafless trees in the foreground, middle ground and receding into infinity through a brown foggy haze. The painting has a monochromatic palette and leaves the viewer with an oppressive, slightly scary, and very isolated feeling.

DESCRIPTION: A 1930s car with round chrome exterior headlights on each side of the radiator and large balloon-like racing tires is driving over an art deco styled concrete bridge and past a craggy mountain. A few bushes create the fore-ground on the right. The sky is shown as an orange sunset with ominous clouds showing the dark night quickly approaching.

DESCRIPTION: An automobile is driving toward the viewer down a potholed dirt road with a man in a green hat in the foreground. On the left is a row of telephone poles demonstrating perfect one point perspective towards the horizon line and on the right, a very green scene of grass and leafy trees is dabbled with sunlight. A black cloud with a long tornado funnel bending down from it is scraping across this bucolic landscape, destroying it. The painting leaves the viewer with a feeling of impending doom.

DESCRIPTION: A modern art, faceless and featureless person is in a room with few furnishings, he or she is sitting in a chair, also shown is a table with a white cloth, a mirror on the wall, a vertical hot-water-heat-radiator, a hanging light fixture, a large window, and a green door. At the window is a giant robot (like the robot GORT from “The Day the Earth Stood Still“) staring in at the person. There is a pleasant village shown behind the robot. The scene feels very menacing. Is the seated “everyman” in peril or just constantly being watched?

DESCRIPTION: A nude, large framed Germanic woman with short cropped dark hair is lounging on a brown patterned couch. Her face is square and stern and her hips and legs are large and fleshy. Her breasts are undersized in proportion to her body and on either side of the couch are scientific instruments. Does she represent the sturdy mother of German scientific creation? This image should be sexy, but the opposite is true.

DESCRIPTION: A balding middle-aged man with sideburns is sitting in a wooden chair facing the back slats. He is reading a paper and smoking a pipe. The man is wearing work clothes and to his right side is a stretched artist’s canvas with the surface painted grey. He is lit by an overhead hanging light and the room is an overall beige tone. His depressing environment is hardly conducive to the relaxed atmosphere needed for energetic creative expression.

DESCRIPTION: Drawn in brown pencil and colored with washes of watercolor, a soldier, in a worn khaki WWI German uniform with a heavily knotted red bandana around his collar, sits looking at the viewer. His eyes are droopy and his mouth is in a turned down smirking expression. There are bars are on the window and the spirits of dead people, in the shape of skulls, dance around him. Is he haunted by his actions in the great war, or is he actually incarcerated by the path he took during the conflict?

DESCRIPTION: A man in a tattered shirt, buttoned at the collar, is wearing a tightly fitted black felt cap on the top of his head. There are human bones on the ground around him. The palette of the painting is composed of browns and dark greys. A single small black cloud hovers over him in the sky. Behind him, a man with his rear end exposed is sitting on the rim of a 50-gallon rusty barrel defecating into it. Another emaciated man, wearing only underwear, waits his turn at this disgusting latrine. Tall barbed-wire fencing keeps this disheveled bunch contained inside, obviously this is a prison or concentration camp. The subject in the foreground seemed to be a relatively new arrival, because his hair is kept, his beard is short and neat, and his cheeks are not yet hollow. His face wears a stern frown, a look of anger and distrust. He says nothing but communicates his displeasure, none-the-less.

DESCRIPTION: A Germanic man, with a very high forehead, is wearing a dramatic black and orange striped shirt with a deep v-neck collar. (Is this the shirt of a prison inmate?) In his left hand he holds what looks like a bugle, hanging from above by two chords. He seems tense, as if he is waiting for a signal or  waiting for something or someone to show up. Ready to bugle the charge, or the alert to his people.

DESCRIPTION: In this monochromatic work, two men are shown carrying a dead or dying comrade through the dugout dirt trenches of WWI. They are crouching down as much as possible to avoid a similar fate as their comrade. Survival with compassion are all that now matter to these two soldiers.

DESCRIPTION: This political cartoon shows a graveyard full of thousands of dead followers of Hitler. Instead of headstones each grave is marked by an arm popping out of the ground, offering an eternal Nazi salute, a “Heil Hitler” giving their life for hitler’s vision. A tattered pseudo-Roman Nazi banner mimics a cross in the foreground.

(Source: This article is written after attending the exhibition and in editorial support for the book “Before the Fall” – published by Prestel – Munich, London & New York – The Nazi photos and art thumbnails are used for promotion of the book only, the descriptive text in this article was written by ARTSandFOOD editor: Jack Atkinson)