Extremism
and Upheaval.

The Fate Of The Avant-Garde
Modern Art In The Weimar Republic 1918-1928

Otto Dix and Max Beckmann walked the taut rope 'tween objective reality and caricature to create masterpieces of New Objectivity. Some critics place Dix and Beckmann's vivid imagery in the stream of realism; if so, then realism itself became new in the modernist wake of the First Great War. The CornDancers think Dix and Beckmann painted with a muted expressionist's brush, but with a realist's eye for the nature of a thing, or a being, an idea. Their extremism of style reflected the extreme cultural pressures and spiritual upheavals of the age.

Ugly? We don't think so. Rather, we see beautiful people expressing through pose and demeanor the ugliness and uncertainty of their political culture.

Berlin in the 1920s, a website by Karen Storz of Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, highlights the art of Dix and Beckmann. In the ordered style of the Academy, Ms. Storz presents a studied and graphically compelling survey of the Weimar Republic through the lens of the nation's greatest city.

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