The New York times writes about Germany’s Black Years Seen From the Inside a show that’s now in Paris at the Musée Maillol in Paris through Feb.  The show examines German Verisit Art, yet its title, “Allemagne, les Années Noires,” or “Germany: The Black Years.”  

I wrote about Verism – German Portraits from the 1920s @ Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, actually, almost a full year ago – and it was one of the best shows at the Metropolitan I’d seen.

It seems like a lot of overlap between both shows though the Paris exhibition might focus also on paintings in the 1910-1920 date range while the New York show, didn’t.

There is also a significant number of Otto Dix’s work in both shows:

“…But perhaps a more persuasive explanation is simply that Germany lost the war. And in reality, more than the drawings produced by Dix, Grosz, Beckmann and others during the war, it was their caustic postwar take on the conflict that would prove memorable.

Annette Vogel and Bertrand Lorquin, the organizers of the exhibition, have addressed this by dividing the show into the war years, 1914 to 1918, and the postwar years of the Weimar Republic, leading to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. In other words, for them the apocalypse continued through the 1920s, with artists drawing an unbroken line between defeat, decadence and fascism.

Of these, Dix was the most interesting. Like Grosz and Beckmann, he volunteered to join the German Army. But unlike Grosz and Beckmann, who were demobilized on medical grounds after barely a year, Dix fought to the end. And fight he did: he commanded a unit of machine-gunners and, as such, was engaged in the mass killings that he would later denounce.”

Were I in Paris now, I’d definitely go see “Allemagne, les Années Noires,” or “Germany: The Black Years.”