For artists the go-go 80s were mighty fine. Now galleries close faster than they opened, and painters who once sold on spec scrounge for corporate commissions and jobs at Starbucks. Artists and dealers chalk up the art world’s doldrums to bad times all over: people just don’t have enough money to buy art. Create some jobs, they say, and new works will again fly off studio walls.
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In a show that is as fascinating as social history as it is appealing as art, the curators have laid out a compelling argument that the German art world flourished by appealing to patrons’ fear of upheaval. In the years following World War I Germany was anything but a prosperous, self-confident nation. Its political atmosphere–crowded with anarchists, communists, socialists, arch conservatives, and finally fascists–was as turbulent as its economics. When Germans started hauling around those wheelbarrows filled with money, some of them headed to dealers to buy print portfolios.
Lovis Corinth shrewdly realized that print patrons assumed the work of a conspicuously successful artist would be most likely to mount in value and was therefore more attractive. One of his portfolios in the show features prints that depict his very comfortable city house in Berlin and his country estate in Bavaria, a series that marketed its creator as it sold.
