Cripples in the Demi-monde
The April issue of Harper’s Magazine contains a review by Francine Prose of the book Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920’s. The book was published to accompany an exhibit of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last fall, and featured artists who worked mainly in Berlin between the world wars, such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, and, my favorite, Christian Schad. They are starkly real and at times hyper-real, an appropriate style for a school labeled “New Objectivity.”
For those interested in representation of disability in painting, the review is of particular interest, but also important for those thinking about the ways that the re-entry of wounded veterans from the Iraq war will “color” our society. How are artists, journalists, novelists and filmmakers going to portray these women and men, and portray their new-found place in society?
Many of the paintings depict disabled men returned from World War I. Their bodies are configured similarly to those of the recently returning Iraqi vets.
In her review, Prose points out the contrasts that the paintings reveal in the economic situation of “the maimed poor and the porcine middle class.” She comments on the rise of National Socialism “which was ideologically committed to the elimination of …. homosexuals, Jews, ‘degenerate’ artists, defective physical specimens.” She points out that “anonymous cripples” inhabit the world of the demi-monde, “individuals on the margins of society.” Prose highlights the configuration of disability in the social landscape, noting that the “aftermath of the war and the sufferings of its veterans are common themes, and the wounded and their injuries are often represented with a quasi-clinical relish.”
The artists of the New Objectivity used their creative tools to comment on disabled people’s presence on the margins of society. Almost one hundred years later, we too must be alert to the ways in which contemporary art - whether literature, film or painting - instructs us to view our current wave of disabled vets. And we must craft ways ourselves.
