Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier
			Art Museum Programs Nourish Academic and Artistic Interests in German Culture By Adam Kowit
	Why Expressionists Liked Woodcuts and Bold, Rapid Brush Strokes   How Some Faculty Will Use Utopia and Alienation: German Art and Expressionism, 1900-1933   Oberlin's New German Cinema Series   German Culture Series, Schedule of Events   Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Standing Female Nude		SEPTEMBER 16, 1999--The centerpiece of the buffet of German culture served this fall by the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) is Utopia and Alienation: German Art and Expressionism, 1900-1933, opening at the Stern Gallery today. Co-curated by Stephan Jost, curator of academic programs and exhibitions, and Marjorie Wieseman, curator of western art before 1850, the exhibit brings together paintings, prints, sketches, and sculpture selected from the museum's permanent collection and augmented by loans from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and James '64 and Pamela Elesh. The Expressionist exhibit is one of three primary programs in a semester-long German cultural extravaganza. The second is an exhibit of German Renaissance prints in the museum's Ripin Gallery. The last is a film series of New German Cinema, showing works produced during the '50s and '60s. Lectures, discussions, and performances accompany the programs. Together, the events create a smorgasbord to satisfy not only a taste for Germany's abundant artistic legacies, but also an appetite for the varied areas of the humanities and social sciences, including music, film, literature, religious and social history, and the fine arts. Jost says that including a wide range of disciplines and interests is part of the museum's present direction: "To become more engaged with the broader Oberlin College community, both socially and academically." Much of the semester's programming takes place next weekend, September 24&endash;25, which coincides with Parents and Family Weekend. The "giant Expressionist weekend," as Steve Huff, associate professor of German, calls it, begins with the annual Harold Jantz Memorial Lecture, given this year by Reinhold Heller, professor of art history and Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. Heller will deliver "The Utopian Project of German Expressionism" that Friday afternoon in Fisher Hall. A reception in the museum's Sculpture Court will follow the lecture. It will feature German Cabaret music of the '20s and '30s, performed by vocalist Simone Perrin, a senior from Winona, Minnesota, and pianist Greg Ristow, a senior from Falls Church, Virginia. That Saturday afternoon Sigrid Bauschinger, Wolfgang Paulsen Professor of Art History and Germanic Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will give Oberlin's annual Max Kade lecture, "That Dead Certain Instinct for Quality: The Jewish Contributions to Modern Literature and Art in Berlin between 1900 and 1920" at the Max Kade House. Filling the rest of the semester is an assortment of presentations, including gallery talks on the exhibit by curators and student docents. Timothy Corrigan, professor of English at Temple University, will introduce the New German Film Festival with a talk, "The Three Faces of Lola: German Cinema before and after Fassbinder," and Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania will give a talk related to the print exhibit: "Apocalypse Then: German Reflections on the Half Millennium in 1500." The eclecticism of the selections may suit German culture particularly well. Huff speaks of the "moral voice" that German cinema shares with contemporary drama. "You cannot study contemporary German drama without studying German film," he says. "They are one and the same." "Artists weren't looking to do just painting or just some other thing as in the 19th century," says Stephan Jost. "They tried to use all sorts of mediums." The focus was on creating a strong emotional expression, rather than on fine technique. And Sabrina Rahman, a junior from Hillsdale, New Jersey, double-majoring in German and art history, has a related observation. Rahman interned this summer at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York, the gallery that introduced German Expressionism to the U.S. "In German culture in general I've noticed that literature, art, and music are very connected," Rahman says. "The 20th-century composer Schoenberg was also a painter, and the writer [Alfred] Kubin filled his semiautobiographical book with illustrations." It seems fitting that a program geared toward generating a broad awareness of German culture through an array of academic fields has chosen as its centerpiece an artistic movement that made free use of many mediums to express its ideas. A grant from the Max Kade Foundation funded the programming for the two German art exhibits. More information on the semester's offerings is available from Leslie Miller, assistant to the director of the AMAM, at 440-775-8670.
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