Albuquerque Museum Presents German Modernism Amid Empire, Democracy, and Dictatorship
Albuquerque Museum announces Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, on view August 23, 2025 – January 4, 2026. This exhibition traces the German experience in modern art from the early 20th-century avant-gardes resisting the conservative imperial government through the great artistic diversity of the democratic Weimar Republic to the reactions from the artistic community against the National Socialist (Nazi) dictatorship. Some artists adapted to the regime in power, some fled the country, and others boldly resisted, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
The exhibition brings together more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Germany’s distinguished modern art museum. These works were created by significant European artists including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, Christian Schad, Giorgio de Chirico, and Salvador Dalí. Most of the works in this exhibition have rarely or never been shown in the United States.
Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945 illustrates the important role that modern art played in national identity during these critical decades in 20th-century political history while also demonstrating how politics influenced visual arts. It tells the story of powerful works of art, many of which were on display in the 1937 exhibition Degenerate Art – where the National Socialists condemned modern art and ideas – or were created in response to that exhibition.
“While these exceptional objects were created during one of the most complex and challenging periods in Europe, the humanity of the individual artists is profoundly revealed in the stories they tell and the opinions they share,” said Museum Director Andrew Connors. “As documents of history, these paintings and sculptures are complex visual objects, compelling in their sophisticated visual analysis and seductive in their beauty. We are so grateful that the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin allowed us to share these masterworks with our New Mexico audiences.”
“We’re fortunate to have a museum that brings major international exhibitions to Albuquerque,” Mayor Tim Keller said. “This show offers a rare opportunity to see significant works from Berlin that are seldom seen in the U.S., and it speaks to the museum’s role in connecting our community to global art and history.”
Christian Schad’s painting Sonja (1928), among the most famous icons of the New Objectivity movement described below, is a portrait of Albertine Gimpel, a self-confident, emancipated woman in the Weimar Republic. She worked as a secretary and was dismissed from her job in 1933 because she was Jewish. The painter Franz Herda twice protected her from deportation to the camps and then hid her from the Nazis between 1941-1945. They married in 1948 and resettled in New York.
Kurt Günther’s Portrait of a Boy (1927) depicts the child Rolf Schroder whose parents divorced and was sent to live with his father in Norway for safety because his mother was Jewish. He worked as a resistance fighter in Norway, traveling on skis and snowshoes. Rolf grew up to be a humanitarian working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Palestine.
Max Lingner’s Mademoiselle Yvonne (1939) depicts a self-confident young woman striding boldly toward the viewer. Yvonne was an accountant in a Paris bank and a member of the communist Union of Young Women of France. She supported the resistance as a courier and although not Jewish, she was arrested, tortured, and deported to Auschwitz, where she is believed to have died.
Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945 leads visitors through the great shifts in art and politics that took place between 1910 and 1945 in the following thematic sections. Expressionism challenged the status quo of German art with paintings and sculptures roughly drawn and vividly colored. New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) sought to adapt to a post-war social order in the liberal climate of the democratic Weimar Republic through work characterized by careful draftsmanship, sober brushwork, and a kind of hyperrealism. International Avant-Gardes includes portraits of influential art dealers as well as European major artists like Pablo Picasso and Fernard Léger. Modes of Abstraction features works created before and after World War I and during the Bauhaus period, such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Politics and War demonstrates how artistic movements engaged directly with modern society and, by extension, with political issues. An epilogue titled Before and After includes works by artists who had been exiled, labeled as “degenerate,” or were otherwise grappling with the political and humanitarian realities of post-war Germany, such as Salvador Dalí’s Portrait of Mrs. Isabel Styler-Tas, painted in exile in Beverly Hills, California, in 1945.
One of the most iconic paintings in the exhibition is George Grosz’s 1926 Pillars of Society in the Politics and War section, which blatantly ridicules the establishment. Grosz was a fierce social critic, satirizing the military, the church, and the capitalist founding of the Weimar Republic. In Pillars of Society, one of his masterpieces, Grosz depicts the elite of the Weimar State hierarchy as “de facto pigs,” laying bare the corruption and hypocrisy of that period in history.
In The Wall Street Journal (5/12/25), Judith H. Ms. Dobrzynski wrote that the exhibition, then on view at the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, "unavoidably prompts reflection on political developments around the world today ... As difficult as it is to reckon with the period it covers, 'Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945'... is not a depressing show. Visitors may feel ... a need to see even more of what can happen when art and politics collide. History, after all, provides lessons."
Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945 is organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in cooperation with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. Curators of the exhibition are Dieter Scholz, George T. M. Shackelford, and Irina Hiebert Grun. The richly illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition is edited by George T. M. Shackelford, Irina Hiebert Grun, and Joachim Jäger with major contributions by Dieter Scholz, Irina Hiebert Grun, and George T. M. Shackelford, and commentary on each work by a wide variety of German scholars.
The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and is made possible in part at Albuquerque Museum by the City of Albuquerque and the Albuquerque Museum Foundation.