Page 29 - Studio International - February 1972

Meidner's style, which matured during 1912, and paintings like Factory Landscape they even ground into which streets pour as though of
reveals his enthusiasm for the Italians. His make innocent objects like sheds, gasometers, lava. Explosions shatter the sky. Shells burst
nocturnal views of streets like canyons barges and steam-hammers seem like the among the rooftops and people run in panic or
illuminated by street-lamps which seem to burst backdrop for some holy vision or parts of a are swallowed up by the sudden subsidence of
like star-shells and scatter their light like landscape heaving during some earth-tremor. the ground. If it were not for their dates these
shrapnel are full of the dangerous excitement of During 1912, a year in which not only Meidner pictures could be taken for descriptions of
city life and even suggest the powerful smell was plagued by premonitions of some terrible Warsaw, Dresden or Hiroshima. The energy
of crowds in confined spaces, the fetid air of disaster, he produced a large number of and obvious speed with which they were painted
subways, and pavements after a shower of rain. apocalyptic scenes.9 In this respect, too, his suggest that they were the result of an irresistible
Meidner himself was obviously a creature of the work is typically Expressionist for the apocalypse need, or even of terrifying visions : ... day and
night who only came alive in the Café des was as common an image in Expressionist poetry night I painted my afflictions out of my system,
Westens after darkness had fallen and returned as were subjects taken from city life. One of The Last Judgement, The End of The World
home just before the dawn.? the most influential poems at this time, for and mountains of skulls. For in those days the
His writings are also full of ecstatic example, was Weltende, (The End of the World), great storm of the worlds threw with gnashing
descriptions of the power the city had over him. by Jakob van Hoddis, which, according to of teeth a glaring shadow on my whimpering
Here, for example, is a passage from Im Nacken Johannes R. Becher changed a generation and brush-hand.'12 And Meidner does indeed seem
das Sternemeer : `made us feel like new men'.10 Poems on the to have had genuine visions, to have experienced
`Sometimes when I feel a nocturnal need I same or similar subjects were numerous enough paintings progressing as though they were being
venture forth into the city ... and hurtle for Kurt Pinthus, editor of the most famous of produced by someone else.
headlong along the pavements ... the screams all collections of Expressionist poetry, In spite of the extreme horror of most of
of clouds echo around me, burning bushes, a significantly entitled Menschheitsdämmerung, these paintings they are, strangely, not all
distant beating of wings, and people shadowy (Twilight of Mankind), to be able to devote a horrifying. One of them, derived from a view
and spitting. The moon burns against my large section to them which he called Sturz und of the Spree harbour in Berlin, has an exultant
hot temples ... The city nears. My body Schrei, (roughly, Collapse and Scream.)" In this energy and verve and another, in which a naked
crackles. The giggles of the city ignite section appear, for example, Weltende, Heym's man is dead or sleeping while various natural
against my skin. I hear eruptions at the base Krieg, (War), (A great city went down in yellow disasters overtake a coastal town in the distance
of my skull. The houses near. Their smoke/threw itself silently into the belly of the seems to describe a purifying dream.13 A related
catastrophes explode from their windows, abyss) and, also by Heym, Umbra Vitae, which drawing, Apocalyptic Scene, is, in spite of its
stairways silently collapse. People laugh begins : title, even calm. A reclining man, probably
beneath the ruins ... In beds incredible People stand on the street Meidner himself, is watching while a comet
events take place ... Office girls wait for their Surveying the great auguries in the sky, falls on a walled town in the distance and a
lovers. They masturbate out of boredom.'8 Where the comets with snouts of fire balloon floats upwards toward the clouds. Some
Here the city is more than menacing, does more Threaten and sniff around the jagged towers. of these apocalypses were purely imaginative;
than exert a strange hypnotic influence over its The apocalypse, as the ultimate event, others were based on views of real cities,
inhabitants. It is collapsing, going down, represents of course the fulfilment of the although always, as in the drawing of the
breaking up. The energies it generated have Expressionist craving for extremes in every- Blasewitz suburb of Dresden, the Futuristic
finally consumed it. thing and must be regarded as one of the most splintering has gone so far that the motif is no
important Expressionist subjects. But it seldom longer identifiable.
MENSCHHEITSDAMMERUNG appears in paintings by artists other than It is important to recognize that, for all their
Meidner's cityscapes do in fact often depict Meidner. Kandinsky's versions of The Flood frightening aspects, both the calm and violent
the end of cities, describe by extension the end and The Last Judgement have nothing of the apocalyptic scenes are closely connected. For
of the world, and the Futurist faceting, the urgency of Meidner's apocalyptic landscapes, Meidner, in common with many of his
angular imbalance to the point of chaos were the none of their violence and terror. Entire cities contemporaries, believed that the world had
perfect tools for such descriptions. In drawings collapse, disappear into jagged craters in the become so rotten that only a bloody war or a

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