"Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin" brings together more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Germany’s distinguished modern art museum. It traces the German experience in the visual arts from the last years of the German Empire, World War I, and the liberal Weimar Republic that followed to the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II.

Paintings and sculptures by artists including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, and Christian Schad show how modern art played an important role in the discourse during these critical decades in 20th-century political history and how politics, at the same time, influenced the visual arts. Most of the works on view in this exhibition have never before been shown in the United States.

The exhibition leads visitors through the great shifts in art and politics that took place between 1910 and 1945 in six thematic sections, beginning with Expressionism. In the first decade of the 20th century, artists challenged the status quo of German art, painting and sculpting roughly drawn and vividly colored works. The Expressionists’ works were political in their objection to the conservative taste of their times, and specifically that of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Many German Expressionist artists were given prominent places in German museums in the wake of the first World War but were later often banned under Hitler. This gallery will include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self Portrait with a Girl, 1914-15, and Emil Nolde’s 1909 Pentecost, among paintings by other influential artists.