ART/SNEAK PEEK : GERMAN ANGST COMES TO ITALY.

Byline: Associated Press

The 18th-century Palazzo Grassi has become a dark corner of angst amid the shimmering canals and airy facades of Venice.

A major show of German expressionist painters opened this month at the exhibition space, one of the most comprehensive surveys of the period ever presented in Italy.

Not since the 1960s has such an exhibition been seen in this country, where not a single significant German expressionist painting hangs in a museum, according to co-curator Stephanie Barron.

``I think it is a reflection of history,'' she said, pointing to the ``historical residue'' of anti-German feeling dating to World War II.

The paintings are survivors of what the Nazis called degenerate art. Hitler's regime in the 1930s removed expressionist works from museums and forbade their sale or critical discussion of them.

``German Expressionism: Art and Society'' features works by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and 19 other artists who flourished in the first quarter of the 20th century.

The show is divided into themes - paintings reflecting melancholy, life in the alienating city, the horrors of World War I, optimism that the leftist uprisings after the war would change things, resignation that the same old hypocrisy of bourgeois values would remain.

The German expressionists, spiritual heirs of Munch, van Gogh, Ensor and Gauguin, invested their works with dramatic colors, grotesque figures, biting sarcasm and gloom in a transformation of reality to convey individual psychology.

``German expressionism would be unthinkable without Freud,'' Barron, senior curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said in an interview.