Recently I went to visit the exhibition entitled ‘The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-37’, shown at the Art Gallery of NSW. I never expected to enjoy it; I was more interested in it in terms of social history than art. It must be clear that the decadence of Berlin in the 1920s played a significant role in preparing the way for the amoral brutality of Nazism in the 1930s. While at the gallery, I became particularly fascinated with one painting, ‘Imaginary Bridge,’ by Hannah Höch (1889-1978). It shows two heads, who look rather like mannequins or caricatures of human beings, with a baby between them. It refers to the time when Höch was involved in a stormy relationship with a fellow artist, and a married man, Raoul Hausmann, from 1915 to about 1922. According to the artist’s niece, the meaning of the painting clearly points to Höch’s unfulfilled wish to have a child by Hausmann. Everything in the painting speaks of misery, unfulfilled lives, yearning, and distortion. Humanity is longed for, but is missing.
Indeed, art reflected reality. Hausmann was apparently physically abusive, and Höch had two abortions during this time. 1922 proved to be a key point in her life: she could evaluate where she had gone wrong, and repent, or she could lurch on to more disasters. In the words of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Alas, Höch reacted with some bitterness, and turned to lesbian relationships to find some comfort and solace. From 1926 to 1929 she was involved with the Dutch writer and linguist, Til Brugman. As so often, liberation looks like rationalised misbehaviour and code for ‘bondage’.
The Dada group in the Weimar Republic used to celebrate women for breaking traditional gender roles, but this was largely delusion, and still is. During the Third Reich, Höch stayed quiet, and survived, although she married a businessman and painter, Kurt Matthies, in 1938, only to divorce him six years later. Not surprisingly, after the war, Höch continued to be lauded in certain circles for her avant garde approach to life.
All of this is just another heart-breaking illustration of the nature of sin in the human heart. James tells us that ‘each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death’ (James 1:14-15). Höch’s life illustrated this biblical truth every step of the way – she went from immorality to abortion to lesbianism to more sadness and rebellion. Truly, the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, and we cannot understand it (Jer.17:9). There is always the danger that we may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin (Heb.3:13).
The gospel gives us what we need, but what, by nature, we do not want. It promises us: ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation’ (Isa.12:3). It is refreshing, life-giving, and liberating. It is sin which enslaves (John 8:34) and entangles (Heb.12:1; 2 Peter 2:20); it liberates no one. As Simone Weil put it so insightfully: ‘Nothing is so beautiful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil.’
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes