A City's Life In Pictures.(International Edition)(Expressionale: Masters of Expressionism and New Objectivity)

Byline: Michael Levitin

'Expressionale' pairs Berlin's living artists with dead masters. Some works are even for sale.

IT'S NO SECRET THAT BERLIN IS THE contemporary-art hub of Europe: it boasts world-class institutes and museums, more than 500 galleries--the highest concentration on the continent--and a glut of year-round shows and fairs culminating in the 10-week Biennial for Contemporary Art, which ended last week. What is less known is that beyond the low cost of living and bohemian charm drawing artists to Berlin today, the expressionist movement that helped cement the city's cosmopolitan character 80 years ago is still very much alive and engaging the public. The most recent example, "Expressionale: Masters of Expressionism and New Objectivity," blends contemporary and Weimar-era works, presenting Europe's iconic painters of the past alongside the country's hot living artists for the first time. Furthermore, many of the works--by current as well as early 20th-century masters--are for sale, and at prices the average art lover can afford. "No one ever tried this before in Germany, showing early expressionist art in the context of contemporary art," says curator Joachim Leipski.

Viewed side by side, they offer a fascinating record of the city's long and vibrant history. "Expressionale," on display at the Colonnade Park in Potsdamer Platz (through Aug. 24), includes hundreds of works extending from the Brucke period before World War I through the evolution of German expressionism and its oppositional, more-representative New Objectivity movement of the 1950s and '60s, up to the most contemporary artists at work today. Culled from the esteemed Karsch-Nierendorf private collection in West Berlin--which in the 1920s offered one of the earliest and richest showings of expressionist work--the show captures the highlights of the Weimar period, including the burlesque, angle-faced crowds populating Max Beckmann's 10-part lithograph series, "Berlin Trip 1922," and Otto Dix's signature, grotesque drawings and watercolors that depict the capital's decadent post-World War I aura. Other notable works on show are abstract watercolors and a wooden train set built by Bauhaus innovator Lyonel Feininger, a half-dozen small collages and watercolors by the well-known dadaist Hannah Hoch, and masterful charcoal and pastel drawings (mostly of naked women) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Two rarely seen series of woodcuts by Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff evoke the existential uncertainty of war-time Europe. And in addition to the moody seascapes and vibrant watercolor "Sunflowers" by Emil Nolde, a sprawling series of primitivist lithographs and watercolors by Otto Mueller--including his classic, "Two Sitting Girls"--confirms the exhibit's depth and its exotic, essentially German character.

The exhibit also attempts to rediscover some artists that history threatened to leave behind. Josef Scharl, whose ocher-rich, beautifully balanced portraits--including one of Albert Einstein--made him famous in the '30s and '40s in New York, has been all but forgotten in Germany today. ...