MoMA's German Expressionism show

Despite the rain, the crummy week, the crowd, I enjoyed the show at MoMA, German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse. The show is on the 6th floor which required that I negotiate the swarms of members who were attending the members preview. Surely there were other people like myself there, but they were probably also wearing headphones to drown out the loud ties of vulgar fools under the ridiculous impression that there is anything exclusive about the setting, yelling to people who must pretend to be friends, "How did you get in?" or "Grab me a drink!" Or, avoiding the living impressions of Emil Nolde's Young Couple from 1913, of which the show presented 3 of the 68 color variations.

Anyway, among the delights of the show was the Oskar Kokoschka painting of two art historians mostly just because I always think it is funny to see how curators handle self-representation of this kind. Do they glorify their position? Do they hide it? Anyway, the placard explained that Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze were socially prominent, and also that the artist clearly gave them nervous hands.

The show also includes another set of Nolde's work. A series of a house. This one, however, they did not find it necessary to suggest that the color indicates the artist's examination of the various emotional resonances in the man or the woman. Seems to me if they were going to say something so obvious about the couple, they might have said something similar about the tree and house...how the artist was examining the colors of divergence between nature and construction... No? Okay.

Hands down the most touching part of the show was a small woodcut by Kollwitz, The Last Thing. It is very dark and shows an old man about to hang himself. Hyper-inflation after 1923 caused many retirees to lose the value of their pensions. This occurred in Eastern Europe only twenty years ago as well. Kollwitz chose to donate the proceeds of a society that helped the aged.

I find it difficult not to notice the number of shows about the period between the wars. I might be observing what I am inclined to see, so that I will not make much of it, but is there a parallel to be drawn? The Cold War is over. Are we preparing for another, simply making the transition to another long drawn out war? In the meantime, the MoMA show was well worth the crowd, and when I found a real friend in the crowd, it turned into a wonderful time.