MEIDNER: A REDISCOVERY

...In the middle of World War I, Berlin's most advanced dealer, Paul Cas-sirer, gave Meidner a one-man show that made a big stir...

...British painter, Augustus John, tried to help him, but nobody bought Meidner's work...

...In Cologne he found a post teaching art in a Jewish school...

...Yet as Germany, in the early 1920's, experienced an economic miracle, people went back to business as usual, and messianic dreams vanished...

...A comet laughed hoarsely and aeroplanes like hellish dragon-flies glided into the yellow storm of night...

...A famous AtFRED WERNER is the distinguished art critic...

...While there are works by Meidner in other American institutions—in the museums of Los Angeles, St...

...That Meidner's feelings are not expressed in the idiom of the 1960's does not matter much...

...Not so Meidner...

...Otto Dix, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Jakob Steinhardt, and Meidner are the few survivors of the great artists whom Hitler detested and persecuted...

...In a lofty spirit of what might be termed religious socialism, Meidner urged painters and poets to serve the disinherited rather than the bourgeoisie...

...These men would spontaneously distort or exaggerate the ordinary forms and colors of nature in order to portray their inner world of feeling...

...In the nightmarish / and the City, however, Meidner presents himself as a large, tortured, brooding figure, with exploding streets, factories, and tenements for background...

...In his florid prose, typical of the Expressionist writing in the German language done between 1910 and 1925, and almost impossible to render into English, he characterized the human face as "a reflection of heavenly glory and more frequently a battlefield of bloody rage...

...Day and night I painted my oppressive feelings on love, Last Judgments, the destruction of the world," he wrote later, "for in those days, the years around 1914, the toothy grin of the world storm already cast its frightening shadow over my plaintive brush...

...Louis, and Brooklyn, for instance— the artist is little known outside a small group of specialists in Central European art, and a handful of elderly refugees who may recall him as an often pugnacious and frequently eccentric little man from the days of the Weimar Republic between the two World Wars...

...They are the last living witnesses of a tragedy—the destruction by barbarism of what was most vital and most powerful in German art...

...Still fresh from Italy, Modigliani had not yet become the notorious drunkard of his later years...

...In 1906, a sudden windfall—a gift from a well-to-do aunt—enabled him to go to Paris, where a stipend allowed him to study at the Academie Julian and to visit the artists' cafes of Montmarte and Montparnasse...

...He would draw Old Testament prophets with a scroll-pen on large sheets of paper...

...Chagall, basically cheerful and optimistic, painted in Paris a delightful anthology of cows, villages, and tiny Russian houses at a time when people more astute politically were realizing that the days of peace were numbered...

...I used countless indigo and ochre colors .. . Over all the landscapes I scattered ruins, shreds, and ashes...

...the three young men were, indeed, passionate sufferers...

...No longer a young man, Meidner worked for a while as a night watchman in a morgue...

...Unable to paint, in his spare hours the lonely soldier could, however, find the opportunity to write—to compose tormented autobiographical prose poems, as frightening as the oils he had painted before donning the field-grey uniform: "All through midsummer I was trembling in front of my steaming canvases which anticipated . . . the approaching misery of the earth...

...There was little time for art in a London constantly in fear of German aerial attacks, a metropolis full of bombed-out houses and half-starved people...

...German museums and private collectors are purchasing any of his works that survived the 1933-45 holocaust era, as well as his more recent productions...

...The heat surges about me, hot songs wish to emerge from me—a horrible force ruminates in my breast...

...During his sojourn there he learned that eighty-four of his works had been removed by the Hitlerites from German museums as "degenerate...

...At his best, Meidner was never easy to get along with, and he was then deeply disturbed by conditions in Central Europe...

...Meidner and his wife, Elsa, herself a gifted painter, arrived in England with little more than the clothes they wore...

...By then forty, he decided that he was too old for an irregular Bohemian life, and accepted a position as a teacher at an art school in BerlinCharlottenburg...

...Although seemingly secure in the prosperity and buoyant optimism of Germany before World War I, the painter sensed the storm to come, and, in the stark Expressionist style he had pioneered, he expressed the anxiety he shared with his friend...

...There were no air raids on German cities in World War I, yet in many a work executed by Meidner in the 1910-1920 decade appear buildings about to collapse, as though shaken by terrible explosions...

...He arrived with empty pockets...

...Miraculously, Meidner drew incessantly throughout his youth...

...Colors flutter around my soul...

...Despite the physical suffering of the Germans after their defeat in World War I, there was much spiritual fervor...

...He pounced on the fallen board and continued to draw on the floor, completely unmindful of the catastrophe...

...In the evening, Meidner retired to his tiny room where he drew and painted furiously...

...Happily for Meidner, eighty-one and settled in Darmstadt, he is free of financial worries, perhaps for the first time in his long and often troubled life...

...Meidner's most important work was done before World War I. He was prominent among the Angry Young Men of 1910 who felt that everything about the poses struck by the representatives of imperial Germany was wrong...

...He wanted to kindle "the highest socialist virtue, the brotherhood of man," and closed his exhortation with an expression of faith: "May the heavenly voice of justice and love lead us out of darkness . . . We are concerned with socialism— that is, with justice, freedom, and man's love for man—with God's order in the world...

...This job lasted for a year, and it was then that the artist fell in love with one of his students, Elsa Meyer, seventeen years his junior...

...Then Meidner added, from the vantage point of a man close to fifty who had abandoned most of his early irregularities: "The life of the bohe-mian, as I have lived it myself, may contain great temptations...

...He might have ended in a Nazi concentration camp, had he not then left his native country...

...In Painting in the Twentieth Century, the German art historian, Werner Haftmann, calls Meidner "a visionary and prophet of high stature endowed with deep feeling for the soul of his time...

...He wrote a manifesto, To All Artists, asserting that art belonged to the people and should be part of their life...

...He also delighted in painting his friends...

...Hoffmann...

...In the spring of that year a trio, composed of Meidner, Jakob Steinhardt, and a less widely known painter named Richard Janthur, became known as Die Pathetiker...

...Meidner was born in 1884 in Bern-stadt, a drab little potato and sugar beet-growing center in Silesia where there were no museums, no art galleries, or anything at all to inspire a love for art...

...They were discovered by Herwarth Walden, who sponsored a gallery and a periodical, both called Der Sturm, to help promising and unorthodox artists...

...From Paris, Meidner went back to Berlin, determined never to do any commercial work...

...For a description of Meidner in his years of struggle as an independent artist, one must turn to the autobiography (A Little Yes and a Big No) of his friend and colleague, George Grosz: "He was a strange little spirit who came to life only at night...

...Meidner and the men who shared his opinions felt that Impressionism, depicting people enjoying themselves in parks and on beaches, was incapable of penetrating to the core of persons and things...

...In his eighties Ludwig Meidner is having a revival...

...In a cellar that served him as a studio, he drew and painted in his spare time, in his feverishly Expressionist manner...

...It might be interesting at this point to compare a celebrated early work by Chagall, / and my Village, with an early work by Meidner, / and the City...

...Even Meidner decided that he could no longer wait for the coming of the New Man, or the advent of a regenerated Europe...

...Apocalyptic Landscape is the title of another famous Meidner canvas...

...It is interesting—and sad—to bear in mind that, through his pictures, Meidner anticipated the destruction of German cities by thirty years...

...Grosz describes his friend's place as "a hole of a garret, dark as a cave," dominated by a hill of ashes and refuse: "Whenever Meidner gesticulated, which he did frequently and passionately, or when he raised his shrill sharp bass voice in argument, the paper and cardboard would flutter and a cloud of dust would rise from the hill and swirl around the smoke-filled room...

...Undulating forms are painted in heavy impasto, in dark browns and blues, with occasional bits of bright reds and greens...

...The dust rose in billows, and I was seized with a violent fit of sneezing...

...Upon my cliffs I built shattered dwellings, pitifully torn asunder, and the wailing of the bare trees reached to the groaning heavens...

...In more mature years, however, one is no longer inclined to overestimate this way of living—one rather regrets to have wasted so much youthful strength...

...Some idealists like Meidner clung for a while to the hope that a better, more just, more honest society might come out of the ruins of what had been a power-drunk, aggressive nation...

...As a Jew and as a "degenerate" artist to boot, Ludwig Meidner did not feel safe in Berlin, where too many people knew him...

...All three artists often drew and painted self-portraits, revealing unashamedly, through staccato strokes of pencil or brush, all their frustration and fright...

...There is no old art, no new art— there is only good and bad art, and Meidner's work belongs in the first category...

...Though only in his early thirties, Meidner was at the peak of his fame...

...He saw a Cologne synagogue go up in flames...

...Subjected to countless German air raids in the London of World War II, the exiled Meidner must have recalled his own amazingly prophetic visions painted so many years before...

...Behind the glittering facade of a world still at peace, they saw only the rapid preparation for war, and, a short mile away from the glamor of Kurfuerstendamm, the quite unglam-orous dwellings of the proletariat...

...In the aforementioned pivotal picture, / and the City, Meidner himself is seen turning his back on the doomed...

...Whenever he had a spare hour, he went to the galleries which exhibited Cezanne and Van Gogh, still considered by many as uncouth rebels...

...After World War I, Meidner was prominently active in the November Group, an association of artists and intellectuals eager to bridge the gap between the public and the nation's creative minds...

...My imagination bled with horrible visions...

...Marc Ghagall called him "crazy," but admired him, nonetheless...

...Anyone who has seen these canvases of Meidner is not likely ever to forget them...

...While the public, with few exceptions, still refused to respond to the turbulence of his work—oils, etchings, and drawings—by 1912 he was well appreciated in the artistic circles of Berlin...

...Though he was a "hater of the Fatherland," he was drafted into the German Imperial army...

...Fate had often been cruel to him, particularly in those years when he lived under the shadow of the Nazis...

...He was like a character out of a story of E.T.A...

...The trio was disbanded after the hot-tempered Meidner insulted Janthur and Steinhardt during a conversation...

...In 1927, the two were married...

...He did continue to draw, and he perfected his skills in the craft of etching...

...Always I saw a thousand-ringed dance of skeletons...

...For a few guineas each he painted, from photographs, portraits of deceased persons...

...In one of these places, the famous Lapin Agile, he met Modigliani, exactly his age...

...At nineteen, Meidner managed to escape to Breslau, the Silesian capital, where he attended the Kunstschule...

...He advised his fellow-portraitists to "crowd together the wrinkled brow, root of the nose and the eyes, to dig like a mole into the inexplicable gorund of the pupil and the white of the eye and never to rest until the soul of the sitter has been wedded to the artist in a convenant of pathos...

...The French critic, Waldemar George, recently described him as an artist "who looked at the universe—both human beings and things—with spiritual, rather than physical, eyes...

...In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche had declared, "The great noontide must be preceded by the consuming of the city in pillars of fire...

...The Greek term "pathos" includes both suffering and passion...

...Admiring the works of his wife, Meidner more and more neglected his own painting and, instead, turned to writing for newspapers and magazines...

...As required, he painstakingly drew pots, skulls, stuffed birds, until he became bored with these academic exercises...

...It is the prose of a man whose kinship to the ancient prophets is marked...

...Many graves and ravaged cities...

...His own art was violently analytical, like that of Van Gogh before him, or that of his Austrian contemporary, Oskar Kokosehka...

...The men and women who visit our muse-ums might well be reminded, upon looking at his work, that their world is no more safe from attacks by anti-humanists and destroyers than was the world of Ludwig Meidner, the sage and seer of yesterday—and tomorrow...

...Somehow, by himself, he discovered Impressionism...

...his intense expression is that of a doomed intellectual, aware of an incipient tragedy, both personal and public...

...Meidner's disturbingly intense self-portraits and portraits of friends are equally unforgettable...

...His reputation was revived more than a decade ago when the first West German President, Theo-dor Heuss, commissioned Meidner to paint his portrait...

...He would work all night by candlelight, because the gaslight was too uncertain and burned too faintly...

...He was a devil of a fellow, someone after my own heart...

...Posed before a yellow curtain, the poet, who was well-known in pre-Hitler Germany, is wearing a greenish suit and a checkered blue shirt...

...The soul smiles on the point of the brush and sings of my forests with the chorus of the clouds...

...Here, one is reminded of one of his prose poems: "I am dragged through such nights...

...Several German museums have given him retrospective shows (currently there is one in Berlin...

...Oddly, Meidner did not profit from the avalanche of German art purchases that spread to these shores in the mid-Fiities and overnight made Nolde, Kirchner, and Barlach familiar names to those interested in Twentieth Century art...

...This was the period in which the term "Expressionist" was first applied to an art whose creators were more eager to express their emotional upheavals than to paint cheerful landscapes with emphasis on the surface phenomena...

...to eke out a living, he sketched women's fur coats for fashion magazines...

...Mountains like warning voices hovered in the background...

...Above all, his humanism is closely related to that of today...

...He worked passionately, his breast heaving as if he were going through some great emotional crisis...

...He received a letter of encouragement from the eminent Munich painter, Franz von Stuck, to whom he sent some sketches, but his shopkeeper parents apprenticed him to a bricklayer...

...About this subsequent deplorable development, Meidner wrote retrospectively: "Modi would not have been fated to die so young . . . had he lived a little more reasonably...

...As a result of this determination he spent the next few years in near-starvation...

...Suddenly the easel collapsed, throwing the board, paper, and all onto the slag pile...

...The bespectacled writer's unhandsome, bony features are grotesquely exaggerated...

...His most recent books a,-e "Pascin" and "Modigliani the Sculptor...

...This was in 1903...

...The next stop was Berlin...