Allen Memorial Art Museum shows "In the Shadow of World War I"

Written by Casey Forester Tuesday, 07 February 2012 22:46

Oberlin, Ohio - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1915 painting Self-Portrait as a Soldier and four powerful self-portraits by Max Beckmann serve as the focal point of this exhibition of primarily drawings and prints dating from about 1910 to 1925. The emotional drama and psychological intensity of the works on view—underscored by Kirchner’s disturbing vision of himself as a soldier with his painting hand chopped off—suggests the increasingly varied ways artists sought to express the human condition. On exhibit through 7 June, 2009

Also on view are early Symbolist and Jugendstil explorations by Edvard Munch, Wassily Kandinsky, and Gustav Klimt alongside highly expressive graphic works—some of them direct responses to World War I—by German artists Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Käthe Kollwitz. After the war, a younger generation of artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz followed a new path of social criticism in powerful explorations of the brutality of war.

Exploiting a wide range of themes—portraiture, cityscapes, the circus or variety-hall, and religious imagery—these artists sought to communicate a deeper understanding of the world around them. “Art,” Paul Klee famously wrote in 1920, “does not reproduce what is visible, but makes things visible.”

This exhibition, curated by Abbe Schriber (OC ’09) and AMAM Director Stephanie Wiles, was organized in conjunction with Leonard V. Smith and Annemarie Sammartino, Department of History, Oberlin College. Support for the development of this exhibition was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Founded in 1917, the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) is one of the finest college or university collections in the United States. Comprising more than 12,000 works of art from virtually every culture and spanning the history of art, the AMAM's collection is a vital cultural resource for the students, faculty, and staff of Oberlin College as well as the surrounding community. Notable strengths include seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, nineteenth and early twentieth-century European and contemporary American art, and Asian, European, and American works on paper. The collection is housed in an impressive Italian Renaissance-style building designed by Cass Gilbert and named after its founder, Dr. Dudley Peter Allen (B.A. 1875), a distinguished graduate and trustee of Oberlin College. In 1977, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates designed an addition that represents one of the earliest and finest examples of postmodern architecture in the United States. Visit : http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/