Review: Ambition, Seduction, and Chaos in BERLIN METROPOLIS

Among the most common historical what-ifs is this: if you could live in any time period, any city, what would you choose? And among the common answers are "Paris in the 1920s" and "New York in the 1920s," locations and decades that wove their own myths as they went along and would be enshrined by scholars, dreamers, and watchers of Midnight in Paris and Boardwalk Empire in generations to come. Nobody can dispel the romance of the 1920s at this point - income equality and eventual crack-up aside -- though the right people can make the case that the fun didn't stop with the Left Bank and Manhattan. That is one purpose, though only one, of Berlin Metropolis, a Neue Galerie exhibition that plays out as a vaudevillian mash-up of tones and styles and lofty aspirations, only to swerve out of the brash comedy of the 1920s and into historical tragedy.

Curated by Olaf Peters, staged by Pandiscio Co., and accompanied by a voluminous, interdisciplinary catalog, this showcase could have been a bizarre frenzy of images and ideas, of skyscrapers and cabarets and modernist grandstanding. It could also have been a plodding lesson in culture and aesthetics. Instead, Peters partakes of each of these possibilities, only to transcend both of them: the jauntiness both the works and the installation are unforgettable, yet all is propelled forward by the terrible coherence of German history. In 1918 -- the starting point of the exhibition -- Germany was dealing with the wreckage of World War I, but social reinvention and artistic revolution were the orders of the day in Berlin. In 1933 -- the endpoint -- Berlin's entertainment scene was still in decent shape and photo-satirist John Heartfield was still capable of writing off Hitler as a puppet and a stooge. None of it would last, of course. With Berlin Metropolis, the Neue Galerie has crafted a piquant prelude to last year's Degenerate Art (also Peters's work). This time, we get to see how German artists shaped grit and speed and chaos into agitated beauty -- get to see up close why this art, under the Nazis, could never live.

Top-shelf specimens of Dada and New Objectivity, film and theater tie-ins, and (installation wise) the right measure of comedy define the early rooms. A blown-up photo of a bare-breasted woman greets you on your way up to the exhibition, while a working traffic light (a throwback to the initial appearance of the contraption in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz) is positioned right at the nexus of this fanned-out installation. Gimmickry perhaps, but the playfulness of much of Berlin Metropolis enables these touches and more. The first room, devoted to the subject of "The Birth of the Republic," looks at first glance like a re-creation of the 1920 First International Dada Fair - John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter's pig-faced Prussian Archangel suspended once again from the ceiling, Heartfield and George Grosz's amputated Electro-mechanical Tatlin Sculpture once again holding the floor, weird paintings once again splayed over dark walls. With their depictions of lonely, twisted, indeed gallery-like interiors, entries such as Grosz's Diabolo Player and Raoul Hausmann's Dada Triumphs add yet more meta-quirkiness. Elsewhere, the Neue Galerie has festooned one of the exhibition hallways with film posters. Again, you may think that you are being transported to the lobby of a movie house which, by some avant-garde miracle, is showing Berlin Alexanderplatz and Fritz Lang's M on the same night. Then you look to the opposite wall, and discover the delicate white-on-black set designs of Roman Clemens. The illusion is disrupted but the romance is intact.

Peters, it turns out, is preternaturally talented at handling weighty themes nimbly. In this regard, two additional galleries stand out. With the segment "A New Utopia," Peters is tasked with fitting the ambitions of Art Deco and the Bauhaus into a space that may well be smaller than your own living room. Yet instructive segments on Eric Mendelsohn's organic-form Einstein Tower and Mies van der Rohe's relentlessly orchestrated skyscraper projects are somehow made to fit, as is a film projection. This last is a weird departure from the calm and silence of Mendelsohn and Mies, until you see the many photographs of Berlin cinemas and their curving, layered architecture -- film then, film now. Who said the Bauhaus had a monopoly on subtle unities? The clever surprise of another segment, "The New Woman," operates differently. As expected, there are sketches from women's daily life and instructive bits on women's attire; less expected are the raw, uncomfortable nudes of Otto Dix and Christian Schad. The real avant-garde stunner here, though, is Hannah Hoch, whose paintings approach typical New Objectivity subjects -- journalists, politics, hypercharged misery -- in one of the most original styles the Berlin avant-garde yielded. With their diorama-like setups, looming faces, and intentional, throw-up-in-your-mouth sentimentality, Hoch paintings like The Bride and Immortal Life remind you that, however sophisticated life in 1920s Berlin was, kitsch is immortal.

There is a lot else in the show that nicely reverses the assumption that German modernism was mostly sluggish and self-conscious. Photography especially -- Albert Bayer's Lonely Metropolitan (1932) is, for all its avowed melancholy, a neat bit of photo-manipulation. Umbo's The Racing Reporter (1926) is more famously manic -- a figure collaged together from writing instruments and random vehicles, after all -- and Heartfield's jabs at the Nazis are feisty, sarcastic, and fascinatingly content to come off as throwaways. (Eighty years later, the man would probably be writing for The Daily Show.) All this makes it surprising, and probably not for the best this time, that Berlin Metropolis culminates with Rudolph Schlichter's Blind Power (1937), an allegorical painting that depicts a colossus striding towards a cliff, his abdomen gnawed by the seven deadly sins and his visor clamped down, obscuring his sight. We get it. While responding to suicidally conservative politics with essentially conservative art is a borderline illogical move, Blind Power is nonetheless potent -- though not because it refers to Schlichter's Dada roots. Its realistic style, instead, is put to some strange ends: notice how clammy and pale the colossus's flesh is. In a painting that could have been preachy failure and nothing more, this detail deals a triple blow to German political malaise, Aryan pretensions, and the tired symbolism of much of the rest of the composition. Once again, the Galerie is master of its material.

In fact, if there's any sort of problem with this exhibition, it's that the show is too well orchestrated to give you much to question, re-evaluate, dispute, or dislike. Yes, Hannah Hoch has been badly undervalued for too long, but that's about all. Theme and group surveys at the Neue Galerie are often like this, so definitive that they resist assessment; in strangely complete contrast, the Galerie's recent considerations of Kandinsky and Egon Schiele continue to nag at me, making me wonder if my grasp of these artists is as firm as I think. I say this as someone who wrote multiple research papers on Kandinsky, and I see exhibitions this destabilizing as accomplishments for the gallery. Berlin Metropolis accomplishes more, if at the risk of coming off as a 300-item advertisement for a time and a place. Like so many of the artists it celebrates, it finds the messages within madness.