Horror show

‘It is disastrous to name ourselves!’ So Willem de Kooning responded when some of his New York painter buddies elected to call themselves ‘abstract expressionists’. He had a point. Labels for movements — such as pop art, impressionism and baroque — are almost always misleading and seldom invented by the artists themselves. That was certainly the case with the idiom examined in a little exhibition at Tate Modern, Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33.

Actually, this rather heterogeneous assortment of painters has two tags. In 1925, a critic named Franz Roh came up with a nice phrase, magischer Realismus, which was later borrowed to refer to various writers, including Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, whose work has absolutely nothing to do with Germany in the 1920s. Simultaneously a curator, Gustav Hartlaub, dubbed more or less the same sort of stuff Neue Sachlichkeit, or the new objectivity — another term which caught on.

On this evidence, however, neither name has much to do with the art it aimed to describe. What’s on show at Tate Modern is not magical, realistic, objective nor was it particularly new even 90 years ago. If pressed for common factors I’d go for caricature, satire and over-the-top horror. Furthermore, some of the works in the show are startlingly bad, and many distinctly second-rate (but that’s a separate question).

This display is culled mainly from one source, the George Economou Collection, with the rest from the Tate’s own cellars, which explains the deficiencies. Arranging an exhibition in that way restricts the choice. No doubt that is the reason why there is only one painting, ‘Anna’ (1942), by Max Beckmann, for example — who was one of the truly gifted artists of the era — not one that shows him anywhere near his best (nor is it from the Weimar years, which suggests there was trouble finding a suitable Beckmann).