The works of several Jewish artists, and works with strong Jewish themes or subtexts are among those in the exhibition, “The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian and Swiss Drawings from St. Louis Collections, 1946-2007, a collection of 120 important works at the Saint Louis Art Museum through Sept. 7. The works were created by 39 German-speaking artists after World War II. The drawings include works from the Museum’s own large permanent collection and from local private collections.

Jewish artists flourished in the German-speaking world prior to the Second World War and the Holocaust. When Adolf Hitler, himself a frustrated artist who had been denied admission to the Vienna Art Conservatory, and the Nazis came to power, all modern art, especially works by Jewish artists was lumped together as “degenerate.” There was even an infamous exhibt called Entarte Kunst, German for “Degenerate Art,” which the Nazis put on exhibit in order to mock works which they ridiculed as “Jewish” even if it was not done by Jewish artists. Those works by Jewish artists like Wassily Kandinsky were lumped together with works by Pablo Picasso, who was not Jewish, to contrast those modernist works with the bland, idealized works by “official” German artists, who were under orders by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to depict sterile, idealized “Aryan” German men and women and bucolic outdoor scenes.

In the lively Cabaret-era in Berlin between the world wars, Jewish artists like Georg Grosz produced garish drawings illustrating the corruption of German society, images which pre-figured the actual horrors which would unfold after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Many German-Jewish artists in Germany and Austria and in the countries occupied by the Nazis were themselves killed in the death camps, while others escaped into exile and were able to continue their work.

Over the years, the Saint Louis Art Museum has accumulated a vast collection of works by German-speaking artists. Thanks to the generosity of the late Jewish philanthropist Morton D. May, head of the Famous-Barr/May Co. Department Stores, the Saint Louis Art Museum came into possession of a huge collection of important works by Max Beckmann, one of the leading German Expressionist artists.

In the show “The Immediate Touch,” are featured works by such major German-speaking artists as Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Anselm Kiefer, Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer, Gerhard Richter and Dieter Roth, including “private explorations into the aesthetics of the drawn line, preparatory sketches for sculptures and highly finished works that are the size and scale of large contemporary paintings.”

Francesca Herndon-Consegra, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum, points out, “Drawings demonstrate how the drawn line of the artist is the most immediate and spontaneous rendering of the artist’s feelings and conceptions. The drawn line, connected to an artist’s nervous system and energy, acts like a seismograph. It springs from within, moves down the arm into the fingers and begins its dance across the page.”

Significant works by German-speaking Jewish artists, as well as works by non-Jewish artists on subjects like the Holocaust are among the items in the exhibit. These are among those described in the handsome accompanying catalogue for the exhibit by Francesca Herndon-Consagra and Sydney Norton, who researched and interviewed the artists and also wrote an overview of their work.

Among the 39 artists descibed by Herndon-Consagra and Norton is Joseph Beuys, “the only one who was old enough to serve in active combat during World War II.” Beuys’s fighter plane was shot down in the Crimea in 1943, where he was left “nearly dead and half-buried by snow.” He was rescued by Nomadic Tartars, who “brought him to their tent and applied animal fat to his wounds, and wrapped him in felt to keep him warm.” Norton adds, “This near-death experience had a transformative effect on Beuys, so much so that animal fat, blood, felt and fur — all referencing the regenerative effects of his rescue and healing –became key elements in his drawings, sculpture, and actions. It is clear from his use and re-use of these materials that his art is both emotional and intensely personal.”

While Beuys is “intensely personal,” his wounds, according to Norton, “also call to mind the massive collective injury caused by the Holocaust, in which the scale of barbarism and human destruction was so immense that it cannot be represented with words or image.” Norton adds, “Beuys makes specific reference to this social injury as early as 1957, during an international juried competition for an Auschwitz memorial, in which he participated.

“His proposal included a design of landmarks: a series of elevated geometrical forms that served as powerful visual and emotional references to the camp’s entry gate, the crematoria, the gas chambers, and the railway tracks,” Norton continues. “That same year he sketched Death of the Maiden, a delicate figure made from thinned paint onto the back of a manila envelope. To the right of the young girl’s head apear two ink stamps, one of which reads, Comitee international d’Auschwitz, the name of the association of Holocaust survivors who organized the competition.”

Norton further notes that in 1968, Beuys designed Auschwitz Demonstration, a “vitrine containing sculptural objects he had made between 1956 and 1964, all of which directly confront the theme of death and brutality in the camps.” Norton stresses that Beuys’s works “carry within them a continuous subtext of mourning that pertains specifically to the victims of Nazism. At the same time, the repeated references to death and rebirth present throughout the artist’s oeuvre are more often mystical and metaphorical than historically specific, and they suggest a more general articulation of bereavement and catharsis that is connected with injury and loss of life on a global level.”

Thus a non-Jewish German artist, who actually served in the German Luftwaffe during World War II, takes it upon himself to infuse his work with a public airing of the horrors of the Holocaust, merging his own personal pain and healing with the pain and need for healing of the entire and need for healing of the entire German body politic generated by the Shoah. The artistic voice could not be silenced before World War II, and refused to remain silent after the war when many among the German population engaged in collective denial of what they knew to be the brutal truth.

One of the Jewish artists whose work is featured in the exhibit is Anselm Kiefer, who was born in 1945 in Danaueschingen, Baden-Wurttenberg, described by Norton as “a leading proponent of German Neo-Expressionism,” along with Baselitz, Lupertz and Immendorff. Norton points out, “Although he was born too late to experience firsthand the Third Reich and World War II, Kiefer’s large-scale paintings, artists’ books, installations, sculptures, and works on paper investigate, among other aspects of German culture, the traumatic historical legacy of his parents’ generation. By visually revisiting historical moments and places from the Nazi period, Kiefer’s works encourage viewers to reconnect with the repressed realities and traumas of Germany’s recent past and, in doing so, to reflect on those ideas inherent in the culture that enabled Hitler’s rise to power.”

Kiefer has selected a curious method for depicting his contempt for the Nazi artistic and architectural sensibilities by a series of watercolors called “The Painter’s Studio,” which “explore the monumental interiors and exteriors of war memorials, many of which were designed by Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer.” Kiefer, according to Norton believed it was a mistake in post-war Germany to demolish some of the grandiose “ideologically loaded” actual buildings created during National Socialism,” calling it a “way of extinguishing evidence of that disturbing chapter in history.” Kiefer feels “that by destroying the buildings, one does not do away with the ideas responsible for constructing them, and that it is more productive to preserve these structures, reflect on their historical significance, and make use of them in innovative ways.”

Thus we have a non-Jewish German artist, Beuys, who makes explicit references to Auschwitz and other aspects of the Holocaust in his work as a means of reminding the collective German consciousness of the enormity of the crimes of the Nazi era, and the Jewish artist, Kiefer, who believes that it is essential to preserve some of the Fascist Idealist works of the notorious Albert Speer so that we can be reminded of the horrific “ideas that were responsible for constructing them.”

Norton comments that “the drama and emotionally provocative subject matter of Kiefer’s art make many Germans uncomfortable, a fact that most likely accounts for the lukewarm reception that his art has received in his home country as compared with the overwhelmingly positive responses it has had in the United States and Israel.” Of course the very point of Kiefer’s work which deals with such sensitive issues is precisely designed to “make many Germans uncomfortable,” and it is equally understanding that such works would receive an “overwhelmingly positive response” in Israel.

Kiefer also has incorporated references to Lilith, the folkloristic figure from the Jewish mystical tradition into his work. Norton notes, “In 1990 Kiefer created large-scale paintings and books in which Lilith, the demonic first wife of Adam from the Jewish Cabala, presides over the disasters of our contemporary world, such as urban sprawl, pollution and industrial waste.” Kiefer approaches a “graphic novel” method by having “the captivated viewer advance through a sequence of images in much the same way that a reader progresses through the pages of a novel, building upon the episodes in preceding pages, and drawing one’s own conclusions about the direction society has taken.” Kiefer thus attaches himself to the tradition of the famous Holocaust-era Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, whose cartoon triptychs are breathtaking through present and recent Jewish graphic novelists such as Will Eisner, Harvey Pekar and many others.

Another German-speaking Jewish artist whose work is included in the exhibit is the Viennese artist Franz West, who first gained prominence in the mid-1980s for designing and producing furniture that he used as sculpture for installations and interventions in museum settings. Norton points out that West’s work includes a multimedia collage, Untitled, in which “he became increasingly fascinated by advertising images in glossy magazines and soft porn. In all of these works he paints over magazine cutouts, isolates the images from the original context, thereby highlighting their absurdity.”

In his foreword to the catalogue by Herndon-Consagra and Norton which accompanies the exhibit, Brent Benjamin, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, pointed out that “the interest in St. Louis for art by German speakers has less to do with the German roots of this community than with the impulses and backgrounds of its collectors.” He adds, “Many aspects of collecting in St. Louis trace their way back to the local philanthropists and collector Morton D. May. Between 1945 and the mid-1950s, May amassed one of the most important collections of German Expressionist art in the United States. He found such work vital, moving and multifacted, and purchased more than one hundred paintings, the majority of which were done between 1905 and 1920, by a large and varied group of artists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann….He gave and bequeathed over 4,200 works of art to the Saint Louis Art Museum and influenced a younger generation to seek out relatively unexplored areas of collecting, to acquire aggressively, and to build core collections in advance of broader collector and institutional attention.”

Thanks to the vision of people like May and the others who donated, bequeated or loaned significant works to the Saint Louis Art Museum, its patrons can enjoy the major exhibit, “The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian and Swiss Drawings from St. Louis Collections,” at the Museum. This exhibit contains works of major significance and deserves a large audience.