The German painter Lovis Corinth is not exactly a household word in this country. If pressed, informed New Yorkers may be able to connect him with an uncomfortable, agitated self-portrait in the Museum of Modern Art in which the brushstrokes seem to be stirred by a strong wind, blurring the image of the bullet-headed, blunt-nosed painter and muddying the color. Barnard alumnae of a certain vintage, if they were lucky enough to have been invited to see Professor Julius Held’s collection, should remember a vigorous head of a man in a dark fedora. The really knowledgeable might mention the show at the Gallery of Modern Art in 1964 or the Corinth print exhibition held at the National Gallery, Washington, a few years ago. There was an impressive group of his portraits and nudes shown at the Royal Academy, London, in 1985 as part of a rather skewed survey of twentieth-century German art designed to establish legitimate bloodlines for such recently emerge ...

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