expressionism

EXPRESSIONISM

EXPRESSIONISM• A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.

EXPRESSIONISM• Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist

attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.

• The paintings aim to reflect the artists's state of mind rather than the reality of the external world.

EXPRESSIONISM• Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.

EXPRESSIONISM• Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany,

in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval art forms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.

EXPRESSIONISM The most well known German expressionists are

Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norwegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.

DIE BRÜCKE (THE BRIDGE)

• Die Brücke (The Bridge) was the first of two Expressionist movements that emerged in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century. In 1905 a group of German Expressionist artists came together in Dresden and took that name chosen by Schmidt-Rottluff to indicate their faith in the art of the future, towards which their work would serve as a bridge.


• In practice they were not a cohesive group, and their art became an angst-ridden type of Expressionism. The achievement that had the most lasting value was their revival of graphic arts, in particular, the woodcut using bold and simplified forms.


• The artists of Die Brücke drew inspiration from Van Gogh, Gauguin and primitive art. Munch was also a strong influence, having exhibited his art in Berlin from 1892. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), the leading spirit of Die Brücke, wanted German art to be a bridge to the future. He insisted that the group, which included Erich Heckel (1883-1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluf (1884-1976), ``express inner convictions... with sincerity and spontaneity''.


• Even at their wildest, the Fauves had retained a sense of harmony and design, but Die Brücke abandoned such restraint. They used images of the modern city to convey a hostile, alienating world, with distorted figures and colors. Kirchner does just this in Berlin Street Scene (1913; 121 x 95 cm (47 1/2 x 37 1/2 in)), where the shrill colors and jagged hysteria of his own vision flash forth uneasily. There is a powerful sense of violence, contained with difficulty, in much of their art.

BERLIN STREET SCENE (1913-1914)


• Emil Nolde (1867-1956), briefly associated with Die Brücke, was a more profound Expressionist who worked in isolation for much of his career. His interest in primitive art and sensual color led him to paint some remarkable pictures with dynamic energy, simple rhythms, and visual tension. He could even illuminate the marshes of his native Germany with dramatic clashes of stunning color. Yet Early Evening (1916; 74 x 101 cm (29 x 39 1/2 in)) is not mere drama: light glimmers over the distance with an exhilarating sense of space.


• Die Brücke collapsed as the inner convictions of each artist began to differ, but arguably the greatest German artist of the time was Max Beckmann (1884-1950). Working independently, he constructed his own bridge, to link the objective truthfulness of great artists of the past with his own subjective emotions. Like some other Expressionists, he served in World War I and suffered unbearable depression and hallucinations as a result.


•His work reflects his stress through its sheer intensity: cruel, brutal images are held still by solid colors and flat, heavy shapes to give an almost timeless quality.

MAX BECKMANN1884-1950


. Max Beckmann began his artistic studies in 1900-03 at the Art Academy in Weimar. In 1904, he moved to Berlin where he joined the Berlin Secession in 1907. In 1914, he helped found the Freie Sezession. When WWI began, he volunteered as a medical orderly in East Prussia. In 1915, he suffered a nervous breakdown and moved to Frankfurt. In 1925, he was included in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Sobriety) exhibition at the Kunsthall Mannheim. In 1926, he had his first exhibition in America. From 1929-32, he spent his winters in Paris and a week each month in Frankfurt. In 1931, he had his first exhibition in Paris.


• Within months of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Beckmann lost his teaching position at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt. In 1937, 590 works were removed from German museums and 9 works were included in the Degenerate Art traveling exhibition. He moved to Berlin in search of anonymity but eventually emigrated to Holland. In 1940, he was invited to teach a summer semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but the American Consulate refused his visa so he had to spend the War years in Amsterdam.


• In 1947, he taught at George Washington University in St. Louis. In 1949, he taught at the Art School of the University of Colorado, the School of the Brooklyn Museum and Mills College in Oakland, California. In December 1950 while walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see the American Painting Today exhibition, he died of a heart attack. His last self portrait was included in that show.

DIE BERGPREDIGT LITHOGRAPH, 1911

LITHOGRAPHY

• In the graphic arts, a method of printing from a prepared flat stone or metal or plastic plate, invented in the late eighteenth century. A drawing is made on the stone or plate with a greasy crayon or tusche, and then washed with water. When ink is applied it sticks to the greasy drawing but runs off (or is resisted by) the wet surface allowing a print — a lithograph — to be made of the drawing. The artist, or other print maker under the artist's supervision, then covers the plate with a sheet of paper and runs both through a press under light pressure. For color lithography separate drawings are made for each color.

DIE GÄHNENDEN DRYPOINT. 1918.

CAFÉMUSIK DRYPOINT. 1918.

DRYPOINT

• An intaglio printing process in which burrs are left on the plate by the pointed needle (or "pencil") that directly inscribes lines. A kind of engraving which has a soft, fuzzy line because of the metal burrs.

INTAGLIO

• Intaglio - The collective term for several graphic processes in which prints are made from ink trapped in the grooves in an incised metal plate. Etchings and engravings are the most typical examples. It may also refer to imagery incised on gems or hardstones, seals, and dies for coins, or to an object decorated in this way; which when pressed or stamped into a soft substance, produces a positive relief in that substance.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH RED SCARF 1917

FALLING MAN 1950

DEPARTURES, TRIPTYCH

HELL OF THE BIRDS 1938

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER1880-1938


• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner grew up in the working class town of Chemnitz. He studied painting in Munich and architecture at the Saxon Technical School in Dresden. In 1905, he formed Die Brücke group along with fellow architecture students, Frity Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Kirchner was considered the group's leader and he recruited Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde to join the movement in 1906. It was Kirchner who introduced the group to Primitivism as manifested in the art of the South Seas.


• During World War I, Kirchner struggled with alcoholism and he was discharged from the army in 1915 to enter the sanatorium at Kreuzlingen. Over the next few years, he was in and out of institutions both in Germany and Switzerland. His chronic insomnia led to dependence on drugs and alcohol which intensified his severe emotional and physiological problems.


• In 1921, he had an exhibtion of fifty works at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin and in 1923 he had a retrospective show at the Kunsthalle in Basel. In 1931, he was apointed a member of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. In 1937, he was asked to resign after the Nazis declared his art "degenerate" and confiscated 639 works from museums in Germany.


• Ironically, the same year, he had an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Art in the United States. Kirchner had 32 works displayed in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. In 1938, distraught over the Nazi denunciation of his work, he committed suicide.


• Kirchner produced more than 2,000 prints, making him one of the most prolific printmakers of the period. Half of these were woodcuts and most were handprinted by Kirchner in editions of less than ten.

ELISABETH-UFER (BERLIN) WOODCUT. 1912/13

FRIEDRICHSTRASSE, 1914

HOUSES IN DRESDEN, 1909/1910

THE VISIT - COUPLE AND NEWCOMER, 1922

AUGUST MACKE1883-1914

• August Macke began his studies in Düsseldorf in 1904 at the Kunstakademie. However he was truly inspired by his evening courses with printmaker Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke at the Kunstgewerbeschule. In 1905, Macke traveled to Florence and in 1906 he traveled to the Netherlands, Belgium and London. Upon his return to Germany in 1906, he quit school. Instead, he took a trip to Paris where he encountered Impressionism. In the autumn of 1907, he moved to Berlin to join the studio of Lovis Corinth. Corinth's constructive criticism did not suit Macke's temperament nor did the city's oppressive atmosphere. Therefore, he returned to Bonn in 1908.


• His future wife's family supported his artistic endeavors which included another trip to Italy and Paris where he first came into contact with the paintings of Cézanne at Ambroise Vollard's gallery. Her uncle, Bernhard Koehler, became an important patron for all Der Blaue Reiter artists.


• In 1910, Macke moved to Tegernsee near Munich where he met Franz Marc with whom he joined the Neue Künstlervereinigung and then Der Blaue Reiter. From 1911-14, he exhibited regularly in Munich, Cologne, Dresden, at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin and Moscow. His bold use of color came from his contact with the School of Paris. In 1912, Macke, Marc and Klee made a pilgrimage to visit Robert Delaunay in Paris. In 1914, he traveled to Tunis with Paul Klee producing a series of vivid watercolors.


• Tragically, he was killed in action on September 26, 1914.

Macke's most distinguished works date from 1912-14 when he most perfectly combined his French influences with Der Blaue Reiter's Expressionist style. He was equally active in the decorative arts and printmaking occupied a very minor position among all of his artistic endeavors. He produced only one woodcut in 1907 and two linocuts in 1913, therefore prints by Macke are extremely rare.

A WOMAN IN GREEN JACKET

ST. GERMAIN NEAR TUNIS 1914

PATIO OF THE COUNTRY HOUSE IN ST GERMAIN

EMIL NOLDE1867-1956

EMIL NOLDE1867-1956

• Emil Nolde was actually born Emil Hansen, the son of a farmer from the North of Germany near the Danish border. He had a solitary and brooding nature not unlike others from the North. He was often considered an outsider but admired for his inner conviction and ability to create art with intense psychological power. In 1902, he changed his last name to Nolde when he married Ada Vilstrup and began his artistic career began at the age of 35.

EMIL NOLDE1867-1956

• At the Berlin Secession exhibition in 1906, his controversial painting Erntetag caught the attention of prominent collectors including Gustav Schiefler who would later publish the catalog raisonne for his prints. Later that year he was invited to join Die Brucke. Nolde left the Berlin Secession in 1910 after an argument with its President, Max Liebermann. In 1913-14, he and Ada traveled to the South Seas.

EMIL NOLDE1867-1956

• He is considered by many to be the finest intaglio printmaker of Die Brucke. He employed a unique brush technique of treating the copper plate to produce rich tonal effects with textural results. Nolde created almost 200 etchings between 1904-11 followed by bursts in 1918 and 1922. His woodcuts were made in 1906, 1912 and 1917. His lithographs were made in 1907, 1911 and 1913. Nolde virtually created creating prints after 1926.

EMIL NOLDE1867-1956

• In 1934, Nolde was expelled from the Akademie der Kunste. In 1941, the Nazis forbid him to paint. 1,052 of his works were removed from museums and 26 of his works were included in the Degenerate Art traveling exhibition in 1937. After 1941, Nolde left Berlin and never returned. Instead, he and his wife retreated to Seebull House near the Danish border. In 1944, an Allied air raid destroyed his Berlin studio filled with many valuable works of art and his meticulously kept archive documenting his graphic work.

'THE PROPHET', WOODCUT 1912

MASKS 1911

WHITE TREE TRUNKS 1908

THE LAST SUPPER 1909

THE SICK CHILD, 1896MUNCH PAINTS HIS SICK SISTER WITH A FATAL

DISEASE (TUBERCULOSIS)

ASHES 1894

DEATH IN THE SICKROOM 1895

THE SCREAM 1893

DEGENERATE ART

• From the moment they came to power, the Nazis launched a vicious campaign against art they designated "degenerate," a category that included all modernist art, especially abstract, Cubist, Expressionist, and Surrealist art. Thus Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Kandinsky, Kirchner, and even nineteenth-century Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists including Renoir, Degas, Cézanne and Van Gogh, were reviled as exponents of avant-garde art movements that were considered intellectual, elitist, foreign, and socialist-influenced. Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall were, of course, singled out for special condemnation.

DEGENERATE ART

• The Nazi government promoted a "true" German art, continuing in the tradition of German nineteenth-century realistic genre painting, that upheld "respectable" moral values and was easy to understand. Hitler's inner circle also treasured certain Old Masters whom they regarded as expressing the true Aryan spirit, in particular Rembrandt, Cranach, and Vermeer. Museum directors and curators who refused to cooperate with the new anti-modernist collecting policies were dismissed.

DEGENERATE ART

• In 1937, in order to purge German museums of their holdings of "degenerate" art, Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, charged a commission headed by Adolf Ziegler, one of Hitler's favorite artists, with the seizure of works of German "degenerate" art created since 1910 owned by German state, provincial and municipal museums. Although the primary focus was on German art, the Ziegler commission's reach soon expanded to encompass non-German artists such as the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian.

DEGENERATE ART

• The confiscated art was gathered in a huge exhibition in Munich to educate the German people about the "evils" of modern art, and especially its alleged Jewish/Bolshevist influences. Marc Chagall's Purim, confiscated from the Museum Folkwang in Essen, was one of the paintings selected for this infamous exhibition, entitled "Degenerate Art" (Entartete Kunst), which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937.

MARC CHAGALL PURIM

EXAMPLE OF WORK CONSIDERED DEGENERATE…

• The painting—the Folkwang's only Chagall—had been acquired in the 1920's by the previous director, Ernst Gosebruch. Set in a Russian town, its theme is the celebration of Jewish festival of Purim, which commemorates the deliverance of the Persian Jews. In the center a boy carries Purim sweets from the market stall-keeper on the right. Nazi officials chose Purim, along with three other works by Chagall, for display in the notorious exibition.

• Although the propaganda surrounding the Degenerate Art exhibition emphasized its "Jewishness," of the 112 artists represented in the exhibition, only 6 were Jews, including Chagall. Chagall was a Russian-born artist who spent most of his career in France. Most likely he was included in the Degenerate Art exhibition because his early work had become famous in Germany. Purim was displayed in Room 2 of the exhibition, which contained only works by Jewish artists. On the walls quotations from Hitler and the Nazi art theorist Alfred Rosenberg condemned the "incompetents and charlatans," the "Jews and Marxists," whose works appeared there.

DEGENERATE ART

• Exhibition organizers surrounded the paintings and sculpture with mocking graffiti and quotations from Hitler's speeches, designed to inflame public opinion against this "decadent" avant-garde art. Ironically, the exhibition attracted five times as many visitors (36,000 on one Sunday alone) as the equally large "Great German Art Exhibition" of Nazi-approved art that opened in Munich at the same time.

DEGENERATE ART

• Eventually the Nazi authorities confiscated more than 17,000 works of art from German museums, all of which were meticulously inventoried and assigned a registry number. Although "degenerate" works such as Chagall's were to be banished from Germany, the Nazi government realized their usefulness as a convenient means of raising much-needed foreign cash to finance the war machine, or simply to acquire the type of art desired by Hitler. Some of the most valuable confiscated art, such as Van Gogh's Self-Portrait from Munich, was auctioned at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland, in June, 1939.

DEGENERATE ART

• Many of the rest of the museum-confiscated works were distributed to four German dealers, who arranged for their sale on the international art market, often for absurdly low prices. In this way, many important works of art removed from German museum collections found their way to American museums. Tragically, those artworks deemed unsaleable (the "dregs," as Goebbels called them), almost five thousand paintings and works of art on paper, were probably destroyed in a bonfire in the courtyard of the Berlin central fire station in 1939 as a fire department training exercise.

DEGENERATE ART

• German public museums have not requested the return of artworks that were confiscated and sold off under the Nazi regime, because such seizures of art from state-owned museums by an elected government were legal. In effect, the German government was free to dispose of its own property. A law enacted (after the fact) on May 31, 1938 decreed that the Reich could appropriate artworks from public museums in Germany without compensation. Further, in September 1948, museums in West Germany issued a decision to relinquish all claims to art that had been confiscated by the Nazi government.

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