The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia recently began mounting temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. However, because of its peculiar history, the great encyclopedic museum has no German Expressionist holdings. To address the lack, this year the institution has borrowed, from the Greek collector George Economou, an exceptional group of German works from the Expressionist, Neue Sachlichkeit, and contemporary periods. Ably organized by Skarlet Smatana, the director of the George Economou Collection, the show communicates a beautiful notion in its title, “Gegenlicht,” a neologism used by the German post-War poet Paul Celan, meaning, roughly, “counter-light.” That concept certainly illuminates the work on view.

Divided into three rooms, the exhibition begins chronologically, with Otto Dix’s 1915 portrait of the rubicund Bruno Alexander Roscher, flabby and uncertain in his military uniform, shows him trying to marshal some resolve for the war and keep the fear from showing in his clear, watery blue eyes. Nearby, the wraithlike Chantal, Christian Schad’s decadent muse — bare breasted yet gray and gone to seed, with painted lips, and her short hair done up — seems almost to merge into the lurid miasma of the background, much like the face in Walter Gramatté’s The Great Fear, 1918, the red tones of which seem to reflect a conflagration, either real or imagined.

Mr. Economou says he is drawn by the emotional resonance of the German art of this period. What these pictures suggest, however, is the degree to which that emotional volatility serves to critique the society the works reflect. When Dix paints Ursus in Swaddling Clothes, in 1927, he highlights the baby crying. Conrad Felixmüller’s The Beggar of Prachatitz, 1924, and George Grosz’s Cheap Whiskey, 1933, are far more explicit in their indictments of the era’s economic conditions, despite the former’s ebullient and whimsical colors and the latter’s humor. The New Objectivity that unites all these pieces is in fact a type of realism, in that it highlights human ugliness.

With a certain curatorial daring, the second of the exhibition’s rooms pairs—at times on thematic grounds, at others on formal grounds—contemporary works on paper by Georg Baselitz with examples of German Expressionist works on paper. The couplings range from the obvious, like Erich Heckel’s 1914 drawing of a sleeping woman with the vigorously limned head in Baselitz’s Ralph, Remix, 2006, to the curious, for instance, Heckel’s reclining Wilhelm Simon Guttmann on a Red Sofa, 1911, which rhymes with the upside-down figure in an untitled Baselitz.

Although visually and emotionally satisfying, these pairings do not tell us how the critical impulse has fared among German artists of the contemporary period. In the final room of the show, three monumental canvases provide the basis for an answer. Baselitz’s 1982 Eagle in Bed, a large and largely abstract work literally lays to rest the black Imperial Eagle of Germany’s coat of arms: Its sickly body, devoid of feathers or even the triumphantly outstretched wings of former times, calls to mind an aged avian version of Dix’s crying infant. Anselm Kiefer’s extraordinary and enormous Tempelhof, 2011, depicts the empty interior of Berlin’s Weimar-era airport three years after it stopped operating. Its steeply receding sightlines throw history into perspective. Both of these works provide astringent, though poetic commentary on the past that has been prologue to the German present.

Less so Neo Rauch’s Waldsiedlung, 2004: The title conjures a place where members of the East German political elite lived—a sort of communist gated community. Yet the Communist-era costumes and old rural buildings in this surreal confection seem merely nostalgic; the elements of fantasy and heavy-handed symbolism, such as an upended bed that appears to be a portal to another realm, evoke little beyond dreams. Even the spikey red missiles seem more like décor than rhetorical weapons against Soviet-era technology. Not that the artist is under any onus to take a stance. And of course, Rauch’s dreaminess does constitute a sort of critique of past styles, a turning away from politics and economic realism, but his oneiric aestheticism still stands out in this company.

The show as a whole admirably picks out that strain of German painting that sets itself against prevailing conditions. It implies, powerfully, that art itself remains a counter-light to what is.

“Gegenlicht: German Art from the George Economou Collection,” The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia, May 24, 2013-January 19, 2014