Leaping Leipzig

Leipzig took some of the meanest strokes of the late unlamented German Democratic Republic. The Marxist Morons tore down the most important church on the Main Square. (Leipzig also lost its pre-eminence as the Book Capital of Germany to Frankfurt, and is only slowly regaining that status.) Those politicized Christians got even eventually by unleashing candle-carrying faithful from the Nicolaikirche on Monday evenings. You could even argue that it was morally disgusted Leipzigers who pulled the central thread that ended up tearing down that wall in Berlin.

What a difference a decade can make when such people awaken. (My guidelines derive from a romance I started with a Leipzig architect at the opening of I.M. Pei’s Rock ’n Roll Museum in Cleveland in 1990!) Now every time I take the fast ICE train to Leipzig—an hour from my home in Weimar—I’m astonished at how thoroughly and quickly that city is shucking off its bad DDR habits. And so on yesterday’s foray I was more than ready—yeah, eager—to relish a triple ploy at the new Museum fur Bildenden Kunst, a five-minute sprint from the Main Train Station, itself incidentally still one of Europe’s grandest structures.

In the East Wing of the huge station, Die Zeit (the best weekly guide to all of Germany, especially including its weekly ads for museums) featured an annual photo show, F2. It’s a delicious re-run of the grand photos the paper runs every Thursday, to get you well prepared for the weekend. But I didn’t tarry long there, hurrying across the street to the Tourist Information Center to find out what all was going on and decide how long a day pass I wanted for public transportation.

After reading the daily Volkszeitung I had picked up while transferring to a fast train in Naumburg (famous worldwide for its Romanesque Cathedral), I decided to concentrate on the museum’s much-discussed Lovis Corinth retrospective. For 20 years I’ve been trying to remember that this German painter’s name wasn’t “Louis” but “Lovis,” so I was amused to discover that his name originally really was “Louis” until he gave it an artsy twist. Geesh! It was not the last goofy twist I was to find in his quirky, oddballish life.

The show is billed as “Lovis Corinth and the Birth of Modernity.” (It ends October 19, 2008). Corinth grew up Louis in Koenigsberg, 1858-80. Between 1880-86 he moved to Munich, Antwerp and Paris. Between 1887-91 he lived in Koenigsberg and Berlin. He settled into Berlin for a decade, 1900-11. In 1912 he suffered a heart attack that limited but didn’t end his artistic career. In 1919 he moved to the pastoral Walchensee near Berlin, where he died in 1925. There is a narrow range of themes, easily dominated by self-portrayals of Corinth at work as a painter. But the style begins in realism and ends in a cacophony of styles and media, ending with broad brushstrokes expressing a bold thick impasto.

A second dominant theme is a fiercely sadistic religious compulsion with, for example, close-up versions of Christianity, as in the actual nailing of Jesus to the cross, as well as a later close-up of a Roman centurion extracting the same nails. Grossly sexual allusions to the classics, viz., Bacchus and his couplings, complete Corinth’s narrow but powerful range of themes.

He is given to aphorisms. A still life of a wine bottle, for example, highlights these sentiments: “Eigentlich möchte ich je gern allein bei einer Flasche Rotwein sitzen und nur ein Bild durch den Kopf lassen.” I haven’t yet decided what is the significance of the grossness of the clambering men and women not seeming to enjoying their fucking. Somber human stilled lives.

If you don’t look carefully, you will suddenly find yourself in a suite of rooms styled in both a shaggy Jugendstil (and a slightly better Art Deco) and dedicated to Adolescent Sexist fantasies by a Hugh Hefner feel-alike named Günter Sachs. No Sachs appeal for this viewer. A film combo of jets, water skis and other not-yet-grownup manly obsessions, plus installations that stall comprehension concluded by canvases with pretensions to depth that I skimmed over brutally. Yuck.

I blame the Star Artists of the Bauhaus for that wrong turn off the Autobahn of Classic Paintings called Freie Kunst. Free to be foolish, as it turns out with that “lady” (who shall remain Numbless) whose Turner Prize installation was the disheveled bed where she had just been fucked— complete with her used condom! Daring? Just plain dumb. Original? Like a new variation of AIDS. Pleasure? Assthetic, perhaps, but fleeting (like a quick fuck). How can we get these wandering esthetic Brats back on the Autobahn of true genius and innovation? No Idea. Staus (traffic jams) on the Turnpike of Life.

Museums, like life, are full of mysteries. But I found no mystery in the open face of a sweet teenybopper guard. It was her first day on the job, and I the first questioner who broke the hymen of her new career. May all such interrogators be as sweet as I tried to be when I sensed her beginning jitters.

I’m not sure about the hugeness of the main room, where a gigantic David was so towering that one can’t even imagine room enough for a testy Goliath. And the waitress in the museum’s café could learn some manor manners from that young Azubi guard on her first day on the job! There’s a lot more there than Corinth and Sachs.

But I had to hurry on to that DDR History Museum, where each visit lessens my incomprehension of my wife’s East German refusal to stand up to authority when abused. This visit it was the scandal of an East German secret agent kidnapping a baby and the ultimate happy ending of her repatriation, so to speak.

Back to the Main Train Station, and a sleepy Regional Bahn ride home. (It’s cheaper!) Leaping Leipzig, emerging from the DDR Muck. It is grand to see a rebirth of freedom.