Also in the Times, a good Roberta Smith story about two New York exhibits of dark and comic pre-war German art. (read here. lrrfartblog; password: artblog)
One of the shows, “Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870-1940” at the Neue Museum, caught my eye because it’s curated by Pamela Kort, independent curator who co-curated (with Robert Storr) the wonderful Jorg Immendorff exhibit last year at Moore College. For all our our yards of coverage of that show see Immendorff in our artists’ list at the left.
Smith characterizes Kort’s new effort as “a splendidly multimedia revisionist show” and “a little engine that can. At once spare and richly suggestive…”
George Grosz is one of the stars as is Karl Valentin, a performer characterized by Smith as Germany’s Charlie Chaplin. (shown is Valentin as Loreley circa 1916). There’s film of him performing in the exhibit.
The show seems particularly apt given our own times’ clear appetite for grotesquerie in its art and entertainment.
The other exhibit of like material is at Ubu Gallery.
