Alexxa Gotthardt
At the turn of the century,
a thick air of malaise had settled over Germany’s creative haunts. Artists
across cosmopolitan cities like Munich, Dresden, and Berlin were frustrated:
They felt muzzled by the strict bourgeois mores and traditional, state-sponsored
art education that dominated the country’s culture and aesthetics. By 1905, a
small group of painters decided to rebel. Instead of stiff, straightforward
compositions, they loaded their canvases with vivid, clashing shards of color
and pared-down, grossly distorted forms. The works that resulted were raw,
deeply emotive, and shocking.
These artists became known
as the German Expressionists: progenitors of an experimental, multifaceted
movement bound together by the belief that art should express emotion—and
challenge the era’s social conservatism in the process. A group of artists in
Dresden led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, known as Die Brücke, kicked things off in
1905. Their compatriots in Munich, spearheaded by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz
Marc, and Gabriele Münter, banded together under the name Der Blaue Reiter
several years later. Both factions made work fueled by emotion and inspired by
the subconscious. As their paintings became less representational, they also
drew from the flattened perspective and simplified compositions of printmaking
and woodcuts. The vibrant, distorted forms that populate their canvases would
go on to pave the way for mid-century abstraction.
“Art today is moving in
directions of which our forebears had no inkling. The Horsemen of the
Apocalypse are heard galloping through the air,” Marc wrote of this heady
moment in his 1912 Der Blaue Reiter manifesto. “Artistic excitement can be felt
all over Europe—new artists are signalling to one another from all sides.”
In the 1920s, New Objectivity
rounded out the interwar movement. Berlin-based artists like Otto Dix, Käthe
Kollwitz, and Max Beckmann focused on political themes often related to the
horrors of World War I and its psychological toll on German citizens. Gaunt,
despondent, lecherous people fill these works, which were often rendered in
stark black-and-white prints whose simplified forms and shadowy palettes
emphasized their dark, melancholy subject matter.
Explore this experimental,
influential movement through seven important works.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Red Nudes (1912)
RED NUDES
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
RED NUDES, …
Leopold Museum
This sultry painting of two
nudes—executed in a blistering palette of deep reds, oranges, and
pinks—exemplifies the rebellious approach of Die Brücke artists. By the time
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted this canvas in 1912, he and his band of
iconoclasts (including Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and
Emil Nolde) had already established a range of motifs that challenged the era’s
artistic and social conventions. They favored vivid palettes and simplified,
distorted forms inspired by a mix of contemporary Post-Impressionist and
Fauvist art, as well as tribal art from Africa and the South Pacific. Favored
subjects were unfettered nudes and other marginal members of society, like
prostitutes, who defied conservative sexual norms. These elements were employed
to shock the viewer and stir their emotions.
Kirchner and his colleagues
chose the name Die Brücke, meaning “The Bridge,” to signify the path they hoped
to forge away from the past and into the future. In the group’s 1906 manifesto,
Kirchner calls for “freedom of life and action against the well established
older forces.” In Red Nudes, the artist gives form to this cry by rendering a
world free from censure, where people frolic openly in the buff. “In their
rebellion against the strictures of bourgeois society, Brücke artists
approached sexuality with new openness,” writes scholar Deborah Wye in the
Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue for the 2008 exhibition “Kirchner and the
Berlin Street.” “The nude body became…emblematic of their beliefs.”
Franz Marc, Yellow Cow (1911)
Franz Marc, The Yellow Cow,
1911. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Franz Marc, The Yellow Cow,
1911. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Like the members of Die
Brücke, Franz Marc and his group of Munich-based artists explored inner states
in their work. They, too, used intense, unnatural colors and undulating forms
to provoke emotion. Instead of focusing on human subjects, though, Marc often
expressed his ideas through representations of the natural world:
hyper-saturated animals and landscapes, all loaded with symbolism.
“I am trying to intensify
my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things, to achieve pantheistic empathy
with the throbbing and flowing of nature’s bloodstream in trees, in animals, in
the air,” Marc wrote to his friend, publisher Reinhard Piper, in 1908. Marc’s
views corresponded with the Romantic, back-to-nature movement spreading across
Germany in the early 1900s, which proposed that a renewed commitment to the
land would counteract the era’s materialistic tendencies.
Marc’s ebullient Yellow Cow
is one of the artist’s many canvases portraying animals, which he believed
represented spiritual and emotional renewal. This piece holds particular
significance as it was made in the same year that Marc and Kandinsky formed Der
Blaue Reiter, or “The Blue Rider.” The term references Marc’s fascination with
animals, as well as a central theme of Kandinsky’s work: the horse and rider.
This theme symbolizes the connection between humans and nature and, according
to MoMA, the journey beyond realistic representation.
Here, Marc’s use of surreal
colors and block-like forms veers towards abstraction. For the painter, colors
were symbolic and held emotional value. “Blue is the male principle, astringent
and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, gay and spiritual. Red
is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color to be opposed and overcome by
the other two,” Marc wrote to his fellow Blaue Reiter artist, August Macke, in
1910. Thus, Marc’s Yellow Cow not only symbolizes spiritual rebirth, but also
unbridled joy.
Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II) (1912)
Improvisation 27 (Garden of
Love II)
Wassily Kandinsky
Improvisation 27 (Garden of
Love II), 1912
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art
Like Marc, Wassily
Kandinsky believed in art’s ability to express the metaphysical realm, and saw
color as a key tool in this pursuit. “Color is a power which directly
influences the soul,” he wrote in his seminal treatise On the Spiritual in Art
(1911), also penned the same year Der Blaue Reiter was established. The text
outlines a new approach to artmaking based on the fusion of abstract forms and
color symbolism—both, he asserted, had the “power of inner suggestion.” For
instance, he thought blue stimulated spirituality, while yellow had the power
to disturb.
Improvisation 27 (Garden of
Love II), painted soon after he wrote On the Spiritual in Art, embodies these
ideas and evidences German Expressionism’s march towards abstraction. The piece
is one of more than 35 “Improvisations” Kandinsky made between 1909 and 1914, a
series intended to frame emotional and psychological sensations. Here, he
begins to obscure representational imagery, but doesn’t completely let go of
it. Blocks of bright color and undulating lines suggest a garden teeming with
animals and embracing couples. Indeed, the vibrant, musical energy of the
painting is reflected in the latter, who seem to pulsate, perhaps evidence of
the love they are feeling.
Gabriele Münter, School House, Murnau (1908)
Gabriele Münter, School
House, Murnau, 1908. © VEGAP, Madrid. Courtesy of Museo Nacional
Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Gabriele Münter, School
House, Murnau, 1908. © VEGAP, Madrid. Courtesy of Museo Nacional
Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Like all women artists of
her era, Gabriele Münter struggled for recognition during her lifetime, and saw
her contributions to German Expressionism overshadowed by her male
counterparts. “In the eyes of many, I was only an unnecessary side-dish to
Kandinsky,” she once wrote. “It is all too easily forgotten that a woman can be
a creative artist with a real, original talent of her own.” (This past year, at
Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Münter’s work was explored in her
first comprehensive retrospective in decades.)
Myopically, Münter is most
often remembered as Kandinsky’s longtime partner, but her contributions to the
theories and aesthetics of Der Blaue Reiter were essential. From the home in
Munich that she owned and generously shared with Kandinsky, together, they
explored how color and abstract form could evoke inner states. Münter’s
landscapes, in particular, evince her willingness to jettison strict
representation, and move from Post-Impressionism into a more expressive style.
In School House, Murnau,
she introduces radiant, unnatural hues and broad, aggressive strokes to a
picture of the German town. She painted the work in 1908 on a summer sojourn to
the eponymous rural hamlet with Kandinsky and their Blaue Reiter compatriots
Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin. It was there that Münter “took a
major leap from painting after nature, more or less impressionistically, to the
feeling of a content [and] to abstracting,” as she later recalled in a 1911
diary entry. Indeed, many of the works she made during their stay employ thick
slashes of color and fast, energetic brushwork that hints at an automatic
process, in which Münter let her emotions and intuition take over. “Most of my
successful works were painted quickly and without corrections,” she later
wrote, “as if by themselves.”
Paul Klee, Présentation du Miracle (1916)
Présentation du Miracle
Paul Klee
Présentation du Miracle,
1916
"Paul Klee: L'ironie à
l'oeuvre" at Centre Pompidou, Paris
As a young artist, Paul
Klee was influenced heavily by Der Blaue Reiter after meeting Marc, Kandinsky,
and Macke in 1911. He was anointed as part of their circle the following year
when they included him in the group’s second exhibition, as well as in their
almanac, a magazine-cum-manifesto that formalized the group’s theories and
highlighted its members. From then on, Klee’s work became increasingly
abstract, aimed at embodying the metaphysical.
Klee’s early work consisted
primarily of black-and-white drawings and prints. After a trip to Tunisia with
Macke and the Swiss painter Louis Moilliet in 1914, everything changed. The
otherworldly desert landscape and lambent sunsets stirred Klee’s imagination,
inspiring him to introduce to his work color and abstract forms conveying
emotion and energy. After the onset of World War I, Macke and Marc both died in
battle (in 1914 and 1916, respectively), and the content of Klee’s paintings
veered further from the physical world. In Klee’s 1916 Présentation du
Miracle, he portrays a dimension far from the realities of war, where magic and
miracles take place.
Several years later, in
1920, Klee would write his seminal “Creative Credo,” which hinged on the adage:
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” The phrase
would make an indelible mark on peers like Egon Schiele, as well as the
Surrealists who came after him.
Käthe Kollwitz, The Sacrifice (1922–23)
The Sacrifice
Käthe Kollwitz
The Sacrifice, 1922
Kunsthalle, Bremen
The horrors of war became a
consistent theme for German Expressionist artists, and some of the movement’s
most searing images are by the Berlin-based Käthe Kollwitz. While she
originally studied painting, Kollwitz focused on printmaking as of 1890, a
medium she believed could better convey social critique. Her early images
highlight the plight of the poor and the oppressed as a means to condemn the
German government’s conservative social policies. But her best-known and most
expressive work was made in response to World War I and the death of her own
son in battle.
In 1919, Kollwitz began her
influential “Krieg” (“War”) series: woodcuts that portray grieving mothers,
widows, and children in rough slashes of black ink. Here, Kollwitz shows the
sacrifice of a mother giving her child up to war, the subject’s sadness
emphasized by the dark palette and cavernous pools of black ink. Kollwitz’s
choice to use woodcut wasn’t merely stylistic: She “wanted these works to be widely
viewed,” wrote MoMA’s Heather Hess in 2011. “By eliminating references to a
specific time or place, she created universally legible indictments of the real
sacrifices demanded in exchange for abstract concepts of honor and glory.” In
1933, Kollwitz’s work was deemed degenerate by the Nazis, who, ironically,
later used her prints as propaganda.
Otto Dix, Großstadt (Metropolis) (1927–28)
Großstadt (Metropolis)
Otto Dix
Großstadt (Metropolis),
1927-1928
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart,
Stuttgart
Otto Dix studied in Dresden
from 1910 to 1914, where he encountered the work of the Die Brücke artists, but
his style shifted dramatically after serving in World War I. Instead of using
abstracted content to arouse emotion, he employed distorted figuration to evoke
the devastation and corruption of war. Other artists who’d experienced the
violence of battle and its tragic aftermath (Max Beckmann, George Grosz) joined
Dix in this pursuit, and together they formed the the New Objectivity (Neue
Sachlichkeit) movement, which tossed Die Brücke and Blaue Reiter’s idealism to
the side to make way for social critique.
In this masterpiece, Dix
ruthlessly portrays the realities of post-war Germany, and the decadence and
violence that plagued Weimar Berlin, in particular. The painting’s central
panel shows a raucous party filled with moneyed Berliners dripping in jewels
and other flapper finery, while the side panels reveal the darker side of
German culture—one where maimed veterans are relegated to the city streets, and
widows resort to prostitution to make ends meet. This dichotomy between
indulgence and wealth and destitution and depravity is a theme Dix returned to
again and again in his caustic, blisteringly expressive works.
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