hh arnason - expressionism in germany (ch. 08)

8/17/2019 HH Arnason - Expressionism in Germany (Ch. 08)

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Expressionism 1n Germany

n its most general sense, expressionism is a termIIJI hat has been applied by art historians to tendenciesrecurring in the arts since antiquity. The aim of all art is,

of course, to communicate, to express ideas or sentimentsthat evoke responses in the viewer. But in the earlytwentieth century, the term was applied to art that con-

eyed, through a wide range of styles and subject matteror in the case of abstract art, no subject at all), the enlo

tions an_d spidtual preoccupations of he artist-what VasilyKandinsky called inner necessity. Herwarth Walden,critic, poet, musician, and the founder in 1910 of theGerman avant-garde periodical Der St trm (The Storm),drew the distinction between new, r e v o l u t i m ~ r ytendencies after the turn of the century and Impressionism.Expressionist artists, including the Fauves (see chapter 7),

built on the discoveries of the Post-Impressionists, whorejected Impressionist devotion to optical veracitY' andturned inward to the world of the spirit. They employedmany languages to give visible form to their feelings, butgenerally they relied on simple, powerful forms that wererealized in a manner of direct, sometimes crude expression,designed to heighten the e1notional response of he viewer.The essence of their art was the expression Of inner meaning through outer form.

Important forerunners of Expressionism included VanGogh, M-q:nch, Klimt, Hodler, Ensor, BOcklin, Klinger,and Kubin. However, the young ~ x p r e s s i o n i s t sin

Germany also drew inspiration from the t ~ own native traditions of medieval sculpture an_d folk or children's art, aswell as the art of other cultures, especially Africa andOceania. In contrast to the Fauves, whose stylistic affinitieswere never expressed through a formal artistic grouping,German Expressionism involved the formation of groupsof artists in several cities, primarily Dresden, Munich, andBerlin. We will see that separate developments also tookplace in Vienna. The period of German Expressionismbegan in 1905 with the establishment of the new artists'alliance known as Die Briicke (The Bridge) in Dresden,and lasted until the end ofWorld War I, when radical Dada

artists (see chapter 13) in Germany rejected all forms Expressionism in their turn. Many Expressionist artistscomed World War I as a new dawn that would see

destruction of an old, moribund order. But as the horrthe trenches dragged on, the war took its toll on arsome died in battle; others suffered psychological traumand profound spiritual disillusionment.

aking it Personal Modersohn-Becker and Nolde

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was borDresden and settled il l the artists' colony at Worpswenear Bremen in 1897. Although she was not assocwith any group outside of the provincial school of pai

at Worpswede, Modersohn-Becker was in touch with developments in art and literature through her friendwith the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who had been Rodsecrd'kry), as well as through a number of visits to Parthese she discovered successively the French Barbizonpainters, the Impressionists, and then, in 1905 and 1906the works ofVan Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. Followthis last trip, she embarked on a highly productive ilmovative period, distilling and simplifying forms whileheightening the expressiveness of color. In her exteletters and diaries, the artist wrote of her desire for aof direct emotion, of poetic expression, of simplicity

sensitivity to natm·e: Personal feelil1g is the main thAfter I have clearly set it down in form and color, I muintroduce those elements from nature that will makpicture look natural. She worried about the implicaof maniage and motherhood for her professionaland, tragically, died prematurely following the birth oonly child, leaving us with only a suggestion of whamight have acllleved. But in works such as Self Porwith Camellia Branch (fig. 8.1) there is a clear grasp obro ad simplification of color areas she had seen in Gauas well as in the Egyptian and early classical art shestudied at the Louvre.


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8.1 Paulo Modersohn-Becker, Sell-Portraitwith Camellia Branch,1907. Oil onpaperboard, 27li XIll : : 62 X 30 em).Museum Folkwang,Essen, Germany.

Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was the son of a furmer fromnorthwestern Germany, near the Danish border. The reactionary, rural values of this area had a profound effect onhis art and his attitude toward nature. Strong emotionalties to the landscape and yearning for a regeneration of theGerman spirit and its art characterized the popular viJ lkischor nationalist tradition. Early in his career, Nolde depictedthe landscape and peasants of this region _ rt paintings

reminiscent of he French artist Millet (see fig. 1.19). s anadult, he even took as his surname Nolde, the name of hisnative village (he was born Emil Hansen), to underscore astrong identification with the land.

s a youth, Nolde studied woodcarving and worked fora time as a designer of furniture and decorative arts inBerlin. His first paintings? of mountains n·ansfonned intogiants or hideous trolls? drew on qualities of traditionalGermanic fantasy. The commercial success of some of theseimages enabled Nolde to return to school and to talce uppainting seriously in Munich) where he encotmtered thework of contemporary artists such as Adolph Jylenzel andArnold Bocklin (see fig. 5 .24), and then in Paris. While inParis in 1899-1900, he, like so many art students, worked

· his way gradually fi·om the study ofDaumier and Delacroixto Manet and the Impressionists, and his color took on anew brilliance and violence as a result of his exposure to thelatter. In 1906 he accepted an invitation to become a member of the Dresden group Die Btiicke. Essentially a solitaryperson, Nolde left Die Briicke after a year and devotedhimself increasingly to a personal forl}1 of Expressionistreligious paintings and prints.

. Among his first visionary religious paintings was TheJl ast Supper o f 1909 (fig. 8.2). When compared wit h celel:lrated old master paintings of Jesus among his disciples,such as Rembrandt s hrist t Emmaus or even Leonardoda Vinci s ast Supper, Nolde s mood is markedly differentfrom the quiet restraint of these earlier works. His figures _are crammed into a practically nonexistent space, the redof their robes and the yellow-green of their faces flaringlike torches out of the surrotmding shadow. The £Lees

· 8.2 E ;;TI Nolde, The LastSupper, 1909. Oil on canvas,33,; X 42W (86 X 107 em).Statens Museum for Kunst,Copenhagen.

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themselves are skull-like masks that derive from the carnival processions of Ensor (see fig. 5.23). Here, however,they are given intense personalities-no longer masked andinscrutable farrtasies but individualized human beings passionately involved in a situation of extreme drama. Thecompression of the group packed within the fi:ontal planeof the painting-again stemming from Ensor-heightensthe sense of impending crisis.

Nolde believed in the ethnic superiority of Nordic people. In 1920 he became a member ofd1e National Socialistor Nazi party. His art was for a time tolerated by JosephGoebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, but by 1934it was officially condemned by the Nazis as stylistically tooexperimental- primitive and un-German. In 1936,like other Expressionist artists in Germany, he was bannedfrom working. Over one thousand of Nolde's works wereamong the sixteen thousand sculptures, paintings, prints,and drawings by avant-garde artists that were confiscatedfrom German musemns by Nazi officials. In 1937 manyof these were included in a massive exhibition called

Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art (see fig. 13.44).Designed to demonstrate the so-called decadent art thatoffended d ~ eNazi government, which preferred watereddown classicist depictions of muscular Aryan w o r k e r ~ ~pretty nudes, or insipid genre scenes, the exhibition COll:-l_·tained art in a tremendous range of styles and featuredwork by most of the artists discussed in this chapter.During four months in Munich, the exhibition was seen bytwo 1nillion visitors, a staggering attendance even by thestandard of today's blockbuster exhibitions. 1 vL 1nyof theworks exhibited, including several by Nolde, were laterdestroyed by the Nazis, or lost du ring World War II.

oining the Revolution: Die Brucke,In 1905 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, KarlSchmidt-Rottluff; and Fritz Bleyl formed an associationiliey called Die Briicke-the bridge linking ali ilie revolutionary and fermenting elements. These young architecture students, all of whom wanted to be painters, weredrawn together by their opposition to· the art that surrounded them, especially academic art and fashionableImpressionism, rathe r than by any preconceived progra'm.Imbued wiili the spirit of Arts and Crafts and J ugendstil(see chapter 5), they rented an empty shop n a workers'

district of Dresden, n eastern Germany, and began topaint, sculpt, and make woodcuts together. The influenceson t h e n ~were many and varied: the art of medievalGermany, of ~ e French Fauves, ofEdvard MlUKh, of nonWestern sculpture. For r l e ~Van Gogh was the clearestexample.of an artist driven by an im1er force and innernecessity ; his paintings presented an ecstatic identificationor empathy of the artist with the subject he was interpreting. The graphic works of Munch were widely known inGermany by 1905, and ilie artist himself was spendingmost of his time there. His obsession with symbolic

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subjects struck a sympathetic chol'd in youug Germanartists, and from his mastery ofd1.e graphic techniques theycould learn much. Ald1ough they worked in many medt was probably their intensive study of the possibilit

of woodcut that did most to formulate their styles andclarifY their directions. Among historic styles, the mexciting discovery was art from Afiica and the SoPacific, of which notable collections existed in the DresdenEthnographic M u s e u m ~

In 1906 Nolde and Max Pechstein joined Die Brl\cke.In the same year Heckel, then working for an architecpersuaded a manufacturer for whom he had executedshowroom to permit d1e Brli.cke a r ~ i s t sto exhibit theThis was the historic first Bri.icke exhibition, whichmarked the emergence of twentieth-century GermaExpressionism. l i t t le information about the exhibitionsurvived, since no catalogue was issued, and it attractvirtually no attention.

During the next few years the Bri.i.cke painters exhibittogether and produc ed publications designed by memband manifestos in which Kirchner's ideas were mostdent. The human figure was studied assiduously in. d1eRodin had studied d1e nude: not posed formally but sply existing in the envirmm1ent. Despite developing differences in style among the artists, a hard, Gothic angularityperme ated many. of their works.

The Brli.cke painters were conscious of the revolutithat the Fauves were creating in Paris ?-nd were aft Cctetheir use of color. However, their: own paintings maintained a Germanic sense of expressive subject mat ter and chamcteristically jagged, Gothic s t r u ~ t u r eand form.1911 most of the Bri.icke group were in Berlin, wherenew style appeared in thei r works, reflecting the increasing

consciousness ofFrench Cubi sm (see cl1apter 10) as welFauvism, given a Germanic excitement and narrativeimpact. By 1913 Die Briicke was dissolved as an assotion, j1nd the artists proceeded individually.

KirchnerThe -most creative member of Die Briicke was ErLudwig Kirchner ~ 1 8 8 0 - 1 9 3 8 ) .In addition toextraordinary output of painting and prints, Kirchner,Erich Heckel, made large, roughly hewn and painwooden sculptures. These works in a primitivist mode wa result of the artists' admiration for Mrican and Ocea

art. Kirchner's early ambition to become an artist was rforced by his discovery of the sixteenth-century woodcutof Albrecht Diirer and his Late Gothic predecessors. Yeown first woodcuts, done before 1900, were probabmost influenced by Felix Vallotton and Edvard MuncBetween 1901 and 1903 Kirchner studi ed architectureDresden, and then, tmtil 1904, painting in Munich .Ihe was attracted to Art Nouvea u designs and repelledthe retrograde paintings he saw in the exhibition ofMunich Secession. Like so many of the younger Genwartists of the time, he was particularly drawn to Geri


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8.3 Ernst ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden 190B dated 1907 an painting). Oil on canvas, 4 11 % X 6'61 "11 51 X 2 m). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gothic art. O f modern artists, the first revelation for himwas the work of Seurat. Going beyond Sem·at's researches,Kirchner undertook studies of nineteenth-century colortheories that led him back to Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe's essay History of he Theory of Colors.

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8.4 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Market Place with Red Tower1915. Oil on canvas, 47l> X 35lii" (120.7 X 91.1 em).Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany.

8.5 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Se/fPorlraitwith Cat, 1919-20. Oil oncanvas, 47)4 X 33W' (120 X 85 em). Busch-Reisinger Museum,Harvar d Universi y Art Museums, C ambr idge , Massachusetts.

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Cubist works, but uses Cubist geometry ·with cautiocombining it wid1 defined perspective space distorted ithe manner of Van Gogh for the similar end of crea claustrophobic effect of compression-what Kirccalled the melancholy of big city streets.

When World War I broke out Kirchner enlisted ifield artillery, but he suffered a mental and physical bdown and was discharged in 1915. He recuperate

Switzerland, where he continued to Jive and work neatown of Davos until his death by suicide in 1938. Durinthis late period in his career Kirchner continued to rhis style, painting many of his older themes along wserene Alpine landscapes and sympathetic portrayals Swiss peasant life. The Swiss landscape can be seen througthe window in Kirchner's moving Self-Portrait with C(fig. 8.5), in which the artist's weary countenance betrayshis protrac ted struggle with illness and depression.

Heckel Miiller Pechstein, and Schmidt-RottluffErich Heckel (1883-1970) was a more restrai

Expressionist whose early paintings at their best showedflashes of psychological insight and lyricism. After 1920turned increasingly to the production of colorful but etially Romantic-Realist landscapes. A painting such asMen t a Table (fig. 8.6) evokes a dramatic interplaywhich not only the figures but the contracted, tilted spof the room is charged with emotion. This painting, dedicated to Dostoyevslcy, is almost a literal illustration frothe Russian novelist's Brothers J aramazov. The paintithe tortured Christ, the suffering face of the man al e ~ the menace of the other-all refer to Ivan's storythe novel, of Christ and the Grand Inquisitor.

Using the most delicate and muted colors of alBriicke painters, Otto Miiller (1874-1930) created wthat suggest an Oriental elegance in their organization.His 'hudes are attenuated, awkwardly graceful figures

8.6 Erich Heckel, Two Men at a Table 1912. Oil on can8 ~ X 47Xi (96.8 X 120 em). Kunsthalle, Hamburg.


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whose softly outlined, yellow-ocher bodies blend imperceptibly and harmoniously into the green and yellowfoliage of their setting (fig. 8.7). He was impressed byancient Egyptian wall paintings and developed techniquesto emulate their muted tonalities. The unidealized, candiddepiction of nudes in open nature was among the Brikkeartists' favorite subjects. They saw the nude as a welcomerelease from nineteenth-century prudery and a liberating

plunge into primal experience. s Nolde proclaimed,echoing the widely shared, i f unwittingly patronizing,view of primitive peoples that was current at the time,

Primordial peoples live in their nature, are one with it andare a part of the entire universe. The relative gentleness ofMtiller's treatment of this theme found an echo in the contemporary photographs of he German-born photographerHeinrich Kiihn 1866-1944), who, like early twentiethcentury modernists in painting, sought to flatten space andcreate a more two-dimensional d e s i g n ~Pictodal effect,as the photographers would have said-by viewing hissubject or scene li'om above (fig. 8.8).

8 7 Otto Muller, BathingWomen 1912 Crayonon paper, 17% X 13%[43 7 X 33 5 em).Bildarchiv RheinischesMuseym, Cologne.

8 8 Heinrich Kuhn, The Artist s Umbrella, 1910 Photogravureon heavy woven paper, 9 X 11% [23 X 28 9 em). TheMetropolitan Museum of Art New York.

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8.9 M Jx Pechslein, Indian and Woman, 1910. Oil oncanvas, 32li X 26li" (81.9 X 66.7 em). The SainllDuisArt Museum.

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Max Pechstein 1881-1953) had a considerable headstart in art by the time he joined Die Briicke in 1906.He had stndied for several years at t he Dresden Academy,and in general enjoyed an earlier success than the othBriicke painters. In 1905 he had seen a collection of wocarvings fi·om the Palau Islands in Dresden's ethnographicmuseum, and t;hese had a formative influence on his worIn 1914 he traveled to these islands in the Pacific to stuthe art at first hand. Pechstein was the 'most eclectic othe Briicke group, capable of notable individual paintingsthat shifi from one style to another. The early ndian andWoman (fig. 8.9) shows him at his dramatic best in termof the exotic subject, modeling of the figures, a nd Fauveinspircd color. Pechstein's drawing is sculptural and curvilinear in contrast to that of MUller or Heckel, and it wnot tinged by the intense anxiety that informed so muchof Kirchner's work.

In 1910 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff 1884-1976) pou·ayed himself as the very image of the arrogant youngExpressionist-in a green turdeneck sweater, completewith beard and monocle, against a roughly painted b

ground of a yellow doorway flanked by purpli.sh-browcurtains (fig. 8.10). Aside from Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluffwas the boldest colorist of the group, ~ v nto vivid blu

8.10 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Se/FPortrait withMonocle 1910. Oil oncanvas, 33)1 X 30"(84.1 X 76.2 em).Staatliche Museen zuBerlin, Preussischer

Kulturbesitz,Nationalga\erie.


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cdmsons, yellows and greens, juxtaposed in jarring butdissonance. Although never a fully abstract

he was probably the metnber of Die Brliclce whofurthest and most convincingly in the direction ofstructure. Schmidt-Rottluff had been t r ~ m m t i z e d

his service in Russia during World War I, and was latercornrr1ssior1ed to redesign t he imperial German eagle, casts

which were placed on buildings throughout Germany.tllls service to his country, when the Nazis came to

he was dismissed from his position as professor of artBerlin in 1933 and forbidden to work. His Self Portrait

Monocle was seized from the museum that hadorcmi1edit in 1924 and included in the 1937 Degenerate

show staged by the Nazis.

the principal contributions of GermanEJcpr·es>:ioJ:tism was the revival of printmalcing as a major

of art. During the tllneteenth century a large numberexperimental painters and sculptors had made prints,

toward the end of the century, in the hands of artistsToulouse-Larmec (see fig. 3.29), Gauguin, Redan,

Klin§>er, and Ensor, printmaking assumed an_llnportance asindependent art form beyond anything that had existed

the Renaissance. Several early twentieth-centuryoutside Germany-Picasso, Munch, Rouault-were

in1pc>rt:mt printmakers as well as painters. In Germany,hcJw,cve:r, a country with a particularly rich tradition ofprintmaking, this art form occupied a special place, and

revival contributed to the character of painting andsc:uljJtlilrC. Expressionist artists sought a direct engagem_ent

their materials and adapted their technique to the:e>dg' X 7 (24 X 17 8 em),sheet 1 I% X 9% [30 X 24 7 em). National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C.

His Prophet of 1912 owes something to Late GothicGerman woodcuts as well as the prints of Mtmch, with

c its intense black-and-white contrast and bold, jaggedshapes that exploit the natural grain of he woodblock. Hislithographs, which differ in expression from the ruggedforms of this Woodcut, include Female Dancer (fig. 8.12),one of the greatest of all German Expressimllst prints.Nolde appreciated the artistic fi·eedom afforded him bythe lithographic meditm1, which he used in experimentalways, brushing ink directly on the stone printing matrixto create thin, variable washes of color. He was interestedin tl1.e body as an expressive vehicle, and had made sketchesin the theaters and cabarets of Berlin, as had Kirchner.But the sense of frenzied emotion and wild abandon in

Female Dancer evokes associations With some primalritual rather than with urban dance halls. Nolde hadstudied the work of non-European cultures in tnuseumssuch as the Berlin Ethnographic Musemn, concluding thatOceanic and African art possessed a vitality that muchWestern art lacked. He argued for their study as objectsof aesthetic as well as scientific interest and made drawingsof objects that were then incorporated into his still-lifepaintings. In 1913, shortly after making this lithograph,Nolde joined an official ethnographic expedition toNew Guinea, then a Gennan colony in the South Pacific,and later traveled to East Asia. He made sketches of

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8.12 Emil Nolde, Female Dancer 1913. ~ l o rlithograph, 20% X 27W' (53 X 69 em). Nolde-Stiftung SeebUII, Germany.

the landscapes and local inhabitants on his journeys,from which he returned highly critical of Europeancolonial practices.

Kirchner, in both black-and-white and color woo< ,cuts,developed an intricate, linear style that looked back to thewoodcuts of DUrer and Martin Schongauer. In a powerfulportrait of the Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry vande Velde, he used characteristic V-shaped gouges to createcomplex surface patterns. By contrast, Heckel s colorwoodcut Standing Child (fig. 8.13 is a spare composition.Heckel s adolescent subject was a girl named Friinzi, who,with her sister Marcella, was a favorite model of the Briiclcegroup. The artist reserved the color of the paper fur themodel s skin and employed d1ree woodblocks-for black,green, and red inks-in the puzzle technique invented by

Munch (see fig. 5.20), for the brilliant, abstracted landscape behind her. It is a gripping image for its forthrightdesign and the frank, precocious sexuality of the sitter.

Like Nolde, Pechstein chose dance as his subject fora color woodcut of 1910 (fig. 8.14 , a work he may havebeen inspired to make after seeing a Somali dance groupperform in Berlin that year. The dancers are portrayedagainst a colorful backdrop that resembles the kind ofhangings with which the Brlicke artists decorated their studios. Pechstein sought a deliberately crude execut ion here,

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8.13 Erich Heckel, Standing Child 1910. Color woodcut14% X 10% [37.5 X 27.5 em). os Angeles County Museof Art.


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schematically hewn figures and a surface covered wi th.imoguhr smudges ofink

IGithe Kollwitz (1867-1945) devoted her life and herboth plintmaking and sculpture, to a form of protest

social criticism. She was the first of the Geiman SocialRe:alists who developed out of Expression.ism dming and

World War I. Essentially a Realist, and powerfully

.COJrrcerm:d with the problems and sufferings of the under->ri11i.lege


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8 16 Kothe Kollwitz,Female Nude with

reen Shawl Seen

bm Behind 1903.Color lithograph,sheet 3 ~ X lBW(59.7 X 47 em .StaotlicheKunstsamm\ungen,

Dresden.

Although best mown fur her black-and-white prilits andposters of political subjects, Kollwitz could he an exquisitecolorist. Her lithograph of a nude woman (fig. 8.16), withits luminous atmosphere and quiet mood, so unlike herdeclarative political prints, demonsu-ates her extraordinaryskill m d sensitivity as a ptintmalcer.

The Spiritual DimensionDer Blaue ReiterThe Briicke artists were th_e first manifestation of

Expressionism in Germ any but not neccssalily the most significant. While they were active, first in Dresden and thenin Berlin, a movement of more far-reaching implicationswas germinating in Munich around one of the great personalities of modern art, Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944).

KandinskyBorn in Moscow, Kandinslcy s tudi ed law and economics atthe University of Moscow. Visits to Paris and an exhibitionof French painting in Moscow aroused his interest to thepoint that, at the age of thirty, he refused a professorshipof law in order to study painting. He then went to Munich,

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where he was soon caught up in the atmosphere of ANouveau and Jugendstil then permeating the city.

S i n e ~1890, Munich had been one of the most acticenters of experimental art in Europe. Kandinslcy was soontaldng a leading part in the Munich art world, even whileundergoing the more traditional discipline of study at tAcademy and with older artists. In 1901 he funned a neartists' association, Phalanx, and opened his own art schooIn the same year he was exhibiting in the Berlin Secessionand by 1904 had shown works in d1e Paris Salod Automne and Exposition Nationale des Beaux-Arts. That

year the Phalanx had shown the Neo- Impressionists, as was Ceza.tme, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. By 1909 Kandinskwas leading a revolt against the e s t ~ b l i s h e dMunichmovements that resulted in the formation of the NeKi:insder Vere inigung NI


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intuitive, emotional response to the world. A close examination of Sketch for Composition II fig. 8.17) reveals thatthe artist is still employing a pictorial vocabulary filled withstanding figures, riders on horseback, and onion-domedchurches, but they are now highly abstracted forms in themidst of a tumultuous, upheaving landscape of mountainsand trees that Kandinsky painted in the high-keyed color ofthe Fauves. Although Kandinsky said this painting had no

theme, it is clear that the composition is divided into tw osections, with a scene of deluge and disturbance at the leftand a garden of paradise at the right, where lovers reclineas they had in Matisse s Le Bonheur e vivre (see fig. 7.6).Kandinsky balances these opposing forces to give his all-embracing view of the universe.

In general, Kandinsky s cmnpositions revolve aroundthemes of cosmic conflict and renewal, specifically the Deluge from the biblical book of Genesis and the Apocalypsefi:om the book of Revelation. From ~ u hcataclysm wo uldemerge, he bdieved, a rebirth, a new, spiritually cleansedworld. In Composition VTI(fig. 8.18), an eno rmous canvas

frmn 1913, colors, shapes, and lines collide across the pictmial field in a fiuiously explosive composition. Yet even inthe midst of his symphonic arrangement of abstract o r ~ s

the characteristic motifs Kandinsky had distilled over tileyears can still be deciphered, such as the glyph of a boa t wifh

three oars at the lower left, a sign of the biblical floods. Bdid not intend these hieroglyphic forms to be read literso he veiled them in washes of brilliant color. Thoug h thartist carefully prepared tllis large work with many preliminary drawings and oil sketches, he preserved a sense ofspontaneo us, u npremeditated fi·eedom in the final painting,

In 1914 the cataclysm ofWorld War I forced Kandinskyto return to Russia, and, shortly thereafter, another phase

of his career began (discussed in chapter , a pattrepeated in th e careers of many artists at t is time. In ling at the work of the other members of Der Blaue Reiup to 1914, we sh ould recall that the individuals involvewere not held together by common stylistic principles brather constituted a loose association of young artienthusiastic about new expedmcnts and united in thoppositions. Aside from personal friendships, itKandinsky who gave the group cohesion and direction.The yearbook er Blaue Reiter edited by Kandinsky anFranz Marc, appeared in 1912 and served as a forum the opinions of the group. The new experiments of Pic

and Matisse in Paris were discussed at length , and theand conflicts of the new German art associations werdescribed. In the creation of the new culture andapproach to painting, much importance was attached tthe influence of so-called primitive and naive art.

8.18 Vosily Kandinsky, Composition VII 1913. Oil on canvas, 6'6% X 9 1 1 W (2 X 3 m). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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8.19 Franz Marc The Large lue Hwes, 1911. Oil on canvas 41% X 71l1o [105.7 X 181.1 em).

Walker Art Center Minneapolis.

MarcOf the Blane Reiter painters, Franz Marc 1880-1916)was the closest in spirit to the traditions of GermanRomanticism and lyrical naturalism. In Paris in 1907 hesought personal solutions in the paintings of Van Gogh,whom he called the most authentic of painters. From anearly date he turned to the subject of animals as a source ofspiritual harmony and purity in nature. This became forhim a symbol of that more primitive and arcadian lifesought by so many of the Expressionist painters. Through

his fi·iend the painter August Macke, Marc developed, inabout 1910, enthusiasms for color whose richness andbeauty were expressive also of the harmonies he was seeking. The great Blue Horses of 1911 is one of the masterpieces of Marc s mature style (fig. 8.19). The three brilliantblue beasts are fleshed out sculpturally from the equallyvivid reds, greens, and yellows of the landscape. The artistused a close-up view, with the bodies of the horses fillingmost of the canvas. The horizon line is high, so that th_ecurves of the red hills repeat the lines of the horses curving flanks. Although the modeling of the animals givesthem the effect of sculptured relief projecting from a Lmi-

form background, there is no real spatial differentiationbetween creatures and environment, except that the sl


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8.20 Franz Marc, Stables 1913-14. Oil on canvas, 9 ~ X 6214" [74 X 158.1 cml. Soloman RGuggenheim Museum New York

Unlike Kandinsky's, Marc s imagery was predo minantly

derived from the material world. But in a group of smallc o m p o s ~ t i o n sfrom 1914 and in notebook sketches, therewas evidence of a move to abstraction. Some of his laterworks carry premonitions of the world conflict that e n d ~

his life. In a virtually abstract painting, ighting orms


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After some Fauve- and Cubist-motivated exercisesn semiabstraction, Macke began to paint city scenes inhigh-keyed color, using diluted oil paint in effects close tothat of watercolor. Great Zoological Garden a triptych of1912 (fig. 8.21), is a loving transformation of familiarscene into a fairyland of translucent color. Pictorial spaceis delimited by foliage and buildings that derive from thelater watercolors of cezanne. The artist moves easily frompassages as abstract as the background architecture to passages as literally representational as the animals and theforeground figures. Tbe work has a unity of mood thatis light and channing, disarming because of the naive joythat permeates it.

Macke occasionally experimented with abstract organization, but his principal interest during the last two years ofhis life continued to be his cityscapes, which were decorative colored impressions of elegant ladies and gentlemenstrolling in the park or studying the wares in brightly litshop windows. In numerous versions of such themes, heshows his fascination with the mirrorlike effects of windows

as a means of u·ansforming the perspective space of thestreet into the fractured space of Cubism.

JawlenskyAlexej von Jawlensky 1864-1941) was well establishedin his career as an officer of the Russian Imperial Guardbefore he decided to become a painter. After studies inMoscow he took classes in the same studio in Munich asKandinslcy Although not officially a member of Der BlaneReiter, Jawlensky was sympathetic to its aims and continued for years to be close to Kandinslcy. After the war heformed tl1e group called Die Blane Vier (The Blue Four),

along with Kandinslcy, Klee, and Lyonel Feininger.By 1905 Jawlenslcy was painting in a Fauve palette,

and his drawings of nudes of the next few years are suggestive of Matisse. About 1910 he settled on his prinlarytheme, the poru·ait head, which he explored thenceforwardwith mystical intensity. me Turandot is an early example(fig. 8.22), painted in a manner that combines characteristics of Russian folic painting and Russo-Byzantine i conssources that would dominate J awlensky's work.

In 1914 Jawlensky embarked on a remarkable seriesof paintings of the human head that occupied himintermittently for over twenty years. Each of these mystic

heads assumed a virtually identical format: a large headfills the frame, with features reduced to a grid of horizontal and vertical lines and planes of delic;:ate color,more a schema for a face than an actual visage. In thetwenties Jawlcnsky made a series, Constructivist l;Ieads(fig. 8.23), in which the eyes are closed, casting an introspective, meditative mood over these images, which,for the artist, were expressions of a universal spirituality.Like Kandinsky's compositions, tl1ey were variations on atheme, but in their restrictive, repetitive structure, theyare closer in spirit to the neoplastic work of Piet Mondrian(see fig 17.21). In the mid-thirties the geometry gradually

~ - 2 2Alexe) von Jawlensky, Mme Turon dot 191 2. Oi oncanvas, 23 X 20 [58 4 X 50 8 em). Collection AndreasJdJwlensky, Locarno, Switzerland.

8 23 Alexej von .Jawlensky, Love from the Constructivist Headsseries, 1925 Oil on paper, 3 ~ X 19% [59 X 49 8 em).StOdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

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8.25 Lyonel Feininger, Harbor Mole 1913. Oil on canvas, 31 X 39% 80.6 X 10 em). Privote collection.

areas In this work Fe ininger stated in a most accomplishedmanner the approach he was to continue, with variations,throughout the rest of his long life: that of strong, straightline structure played against sensuous and softly lumin_ouscolor. The interplay between taut linear structure andRomantic color, ¥lith space constantly shifting betweenabstraction and representation, created a dynamic tensionin his paintings.

In 1919 Feininger was invited to join the staff of theBauhaus, the great experimental German school of architecture mid design. He remained associated with the institution until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933 although

he had stopped teaching full-time iu the twenties becausethe schedule interfered with his own painting. Feininger'swork steadily developed in the direction he had chosen,sometimes emerging in shattered architectural images,sometimes in serene and light-filled structures full ofpoetic suggestion. He ren1rned to the United States in1937 and setded in New York, a difficult move for an artistwho had made his reputation in Europe. Once he was"spiritually acclimatized/' as he said, to his new homehe moved in a new stylistic direction, one less restricted bythe "straitjacket" of Cubism and charactetized by a fi·eerapplication of color.

' In 1912 Herwarth Walden opened a galle y in Berlinfor avant-garde art, the Sturm Galerie, where he exhibitedKandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter, Die Briicke and the ItalianFuturists, ana grouped as French .Expressionists Braque,Derain, Vlaminck, Auguste Herbin and others. Also shovvnwere Ensor, Klee, and Delaunay. In 1913 came the climax ofthe Stunn Galerie's exhibitions, 'the First German AutLm1nSalon, including three hundred and sixty works. HenriRousseau's room contained twenty paintings, and almostthe entire international range of experimental painting andsculpture at that moment was shown. Although during andafter the war the various activities of Der Stm·m lost their

impetus, Berlin between 1910 and 1914 remained a rallyingpoint for most of the ne:w European ideas and revolutionary movements, largely drrough the leadership ofWalden.

Self-E:xaminatic:m: Expressionismin AustriaTo understand the various directions in whichEA'Pressionism moved during and after World War I wemay look at two m·t:ists who were associated in son1e degreewith Expressionism in Austria, where its practitioners werenever formally organized into a particulm· group. Like Klee

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and Feininger, the Austrians Egon Schiele and OskarKolcoschka each had his highly inclividualized interpretation of the style.

SchieleEgon Schiele 1890-1918) lived a short and tragic life,dying in the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918. Hewas a precocious draftsman and, despite opposition fromhis uncle (who was his guardian after his father died insane,an event that haunted him), studied at the ViennaAcademy of Art. His principal encouragement came fromGustav Klimt (sec chapter 5), at his height as a painter andleader of the avant-garde in Vienna when they met in1907. The two artists remained close, but although Schielewas deeply influenced by Klimt, he did not fully share hisinclination toward the decorative.

Schiele s many self-portraits rank among his supremeachievements. They range fi om self-revelatory documentsof personal anguish to records of a highly self-consciousand youthful bravado. Schiele, rawing a Nude Modelbefore a Mirror (fig. 8.26) demonstrates his extraordinarynatural slcill as a draftsman. The intense portrayal, with theartist s narrowed gaze and the elongated, angular figure of t ~the m o e ~differs from even the most direct and leastembellished of Klimt s portraits. Here Schiele explores thefamiliar theme of the. artist and model, but does so tocreate an atmosphere of psychological tension and explicitsexuality. Schiele s models included his sister Gerti, as well

i 8.26 Egan Schiele, Schiele, Drawing a NudeModel before a Mirror, 1910. Pencil an paper,21% X 1311 55.2 X 35.2 em). GraphischeSamm\ung Albertina, Vienna.

8.27 Egan Schiele, The Self Seer Death and the Man}, 1911.il an canvas, 31% X 31 W 80.3 X 80 em). Private collection.

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as friends, professional models, and prostitutes. But when,albeit innocently, in 1912 he sought out children for models in his small village, he was imprisoned for twenty-fom·days for offenses against public morality.

A comparison of paintings by Klimt and Schiele isvaluable in illust rating both the continuity and the changebetween nineteenth-century Symbolism and early twentieth-century Expressionism. Klimt's painting Death and

ife (see fig. 5.6) is heavy with symbolism presented interms of the richest and most colorful patterns. Schiele'sThe Self Seer (fig. 8.27 , painted in 1911, is comparablein subject, but the approach could not be more different.The man (a self-portrait) is rigidly fi·ontalized in the center

. of the painting and stares out at the spectator. Flis face is ahorrible and bloody mask offear. The figure ofDeatl1 hovers behind, a ghostly presence folding the man in his armsin a grim embrace. The paint is built up in jagged brushstrokes on figures emerging fl·om a backgrolmd of harshand dissonant tones of ocher, red, and green.

In Schiele's portraiture, other than the commissionedportraits he undertook occasionally to support himself,there persisted the same intensity of characterization. Butin his later work the tense linear quality we have seen gaveway to painterly surfaces built up with abundant, expressivebrushwork. In one of his last works Schiele dramaticallyportrays his fi:iend, the artist Paris von Giitersloh, withhands held aloft, fingers spread, as though the hands of heartist possessed some mysterious, supernatural power.

KokoschkaOskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), lilce Schiele, was a product of Vienna, but he soon left the city, which he foundgloomy and oppressive, for Switzerland and Germany,embracing the larger world of modefn art to becomeone of the international figures of twentieth-centuryExpressionism. Between 1905 and 1908 Kokoschka worked in the Viennese Art Nouveau style, showing the influence of Klimt and Aubrey Beardsley. Even before going toBerlin at the invitation ofHerwarth Walden in 1910, he wasinstinctively an Expressionist. Particularly in his early blackportraits, he searched passionately to expose an inner sensibility-which may have belonge d more to himself tban tohis sitters. Among his very first images is the 1909 portraitof his friend, the architect Adolf Loos (fig. 8.28 , whoearly on recognized Kokoschka's talents and provided llinlwith moral as well as financial s upport . The figure projectsfrom- its dark background, and the tension in the contemplative face is echoed in Loos's nervously clasped hands.The Romantic basis of Kokoschka's early painting appearsin The Tempest fig. 8.29 , a double portrait ofllinlselfwithhis lover, Alma Mahler, in wh ich the tvvo figures, composedwj.th flickering, light-saturated brushstrokes, are sweptcl'lrough a drea m landscape of cold blue mou ntains an d val- ~ y slit only by the gleam of a shadowed moon. The painting was a great success when Kokoschka exhibited it in the1914 New Munich Secession. The year before, he wrote toAlma about the work, then in progress:

8.28 Oskar Kokoschka Portrait o dolf Laos 1909. Oil on canvas, 9 ~ X 35l£'7 4 X 91.1 em . Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz Nationalgalerie.

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8 29 Oskar Kokoschka, The Tempest 1914 Oil on canvas, 5'11%'' X 7'2% (1.81 X 2.2 m .6ffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kuns\museum.

cI was able to express the mood I wanted by reliving it . . .Despite all the turmoil in the world, to know that oneperson can put eternal trust in another, rl1at two peoplecan be committed to rl1emselves and other people by anact of fairl1

Seriously wounded in World War I, Kokoschka produced little for several years, but his ideas and style wereundergoing constant change. In 1924 he abruptly setout on some seven years of travel, during which heexplored the problem of landscape, combining free,

arbitrary, and brilliant Impressionist or Fauve color with a

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traditional perspective-space organization Throughout hlong life Kokoschka remained true to the spirit oExpressibnism-to the power of emotion and the deepfelt sensitivity to the inner qualities of nature an_d thhmnan soul. In 1933, in fmancial difficulties, the painterretmned :fi:om his long travels. He went first to Vie1ma anthen to Prague. During this period his works in public colections in Germany were confiscated by the Nazisexamples of degenerate art. In 1938, as World Warapproached, London became his home, and laterSwitzerlan_d, although whenever possible he continued h

restless traveling.


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hh arnason - expressionism in germany (ch. 08)

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