Bold visions RISD showcases German Graphic Arts BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The Nazis called them decadent artists, but we admire most of them as German Expressionists. The Bauhaus school of art and architecture similarly was too radical to not be suppressed. The RISD Museum’s "Dreams and Nightmares: German Graphic Arts, 1900-33" is a selection from the permanent collection that surveys with considerable impact that socially tumultuous and thereby particularly creative period.

The end date of the exhibition marks the National Socialist Party coming to power, ending the Weimar Republic and any outspoken tolerance for disturbing imagery. (Interestingly, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels at first praised Expressionism, comparing its spirit to that of Nazi youth.) The first third of the century kept German artists, irreverent social critics in the best of times, in productive turmoil. They proved to be, from today’s perspective, accurate barometers of the pressure that their fellow citizens were under.

There is breadth as well as depth in these 30 works— anguish and affirmation. There are dark war images, literally so, by Otto Dix, and Ernst Kirchner’s somber depiction of men pleasure-sailing under black block print sails. The masterful Max Beckmann is well-represented by seven figure-packed drypoint etchings, filled with Felliniesque carnival characters and rich with symbolic references.

But then there is George Grosz’s watercolor "Artist and Model" (1936) as a bit of comical relief: he is slumped irritably in a chair, liquor glass in hand, while behind him she is preparing to leave, applying lipstick. Max Pechstein’s "Somalitanz (Somali Dance)" (1910) is a colorful woodcut celebration of African musicians that contrasts emotionally as well as stylistically with the Käthe Kollwitz block print of a political leader murdered by fascist thugs.

While we may look back at the nightmares as more representative of this period, dreams and hopes for human betterment were not dismissed as naïve before the first world war. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) lasted as an Expressionist art movement for only three years, until 1914, but its concerns for a spiritual dimension resulted in quite lyrical work. Since this is not a show for canvases, main founder Wassily Kandinsky is absent. But a later work by Paul Klee is represented with a shimmering oil on paper, and Franz Marc is here with an image you likely have seen. "Die Antilope" is a much-reproduced gouache and watercolor of a reclining antelope with what eerily looks like twin building towers in the background. The composition incorporates lines that slash and sweep up and around, enfolding the representation of natural peacefulness in a dynamic world.

"The Antelope" is one of the most impressive works in this collection aesthetically — and the most impressive anecdotally. As the program brochure explains, the work was purchased for the RISD collection in 1938 by then-museum director Alexander Dorner. This was the same man who had lost the painting to Nazi confiscation a few years earlier, when he was director of the Landesmuseum in Hanover.

Most of the works here are not such unique showpieces but rather prints, copies of which are in the collections of many museums. This certainly doesn’t diminish the significance of this display. There is a charcoal sketch by Kollwitz, "Mothers Protecting Their Children" (1918), but her lithograph displayed next to it, "Mütter (Mothers II)," is an even more impressive, and finished, representation of maternal anxiety during the Great War. (The closed-eyes expression of the foreground woman embracing her two children says more about hope for the future than most United Nations speeches do.)

But this isn’t a presentation of German Expressionists alone. We may think of the Bauhaus school mainly in terms of elegant design, such as the omnipresent chairs of Marcel Breuer and Miës van der Rohe, but artists such as Klee were among the movement’s teachers. Otto Umbehr and Irene Bayer-Hecht, represented here, were among photographers trained in their aesthetic of spare design elements. Umbehr’s "Self-portrait on Beach" (circa 1930) shows how a "less is more" approach can increase the impact of any visual experience: holding the camera above himself lying on a blanket, he showed how something as simple as the shadows of arms creating strong diagonals can control the viewer’s eye and that art can be lifted from the most ordinary moment.

This may be one of the few states without a publicly funded art museum, but we’re not doing too badly. The teaching museum at Rhode Island School of Design continually mounts long-running exhibitions such as this one, with information as well as art on the walls — world-class art drawn from a permanent collection of nearly 80,000 pieces. We could do a lot worse.