It was not until the 1920s, when Modernism and Socialism were taking aim at more-is-more consumers and their overstocked homes, that kitsch came to mean any work of art — a sad song or a china shepherdess — that played falsely on the heartstrings. It was in this avant-garde crucible, heated by a yearning for a real and unsentimental truth, that both the chrome design of the Bauhaus and the dispassionate theater of Bertolt Brecht were born.
The story of how Brecht’s face ended up on a Meissen porcelain plate in 1975 is a piece of lesson theater unto itself. So is how the plate ended up displayed on a Brooklyn bookshelf as the prize possession of Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater.
The plate was given to Mr. Eustis by his mother in the late 1970s when he was about 20 and visiting her in East Berlin. A longtime Communist, she had left Minnesota, where she had raised Mr. Eustis, and gone with her second husband to teach at Humboldt University in East Berlin.
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