|
Germany:
Die Brucke
A good deal of the impetus which Expressionism in Belgium received
came from the presence there during the Great War of a number of German
artists, most of them working in a medical unit. Erich Heckel, for
instance, was stationed in Ostend, came into contact with Ensor, and
painted his lost Ostend Madonna in 1915 on the canvas of an army tent.
This underlines the fact that although Expressionism was a European
phenomenon, it was in Germany that it achieved hegemony. It was there
that it became almost a way of life, and it was there that it assumed
its most radical and influential forms. The reasons for this cannot be
restricted to mere stylistic evolution or changing aesthetic credos.
Dangerous though it may be to make generalizations about the pattern of
national cultures, it seems impossible to evade the realization that of
all European peoples, the German-speaking have been the most apt to
emphasize feeling, to prefer the world of the imagination to that of
fact, to be seduced by the concept of storm and stress, to toy with the
ideas of "i darkness and cruelty. This was no new thing. The sadistic
iconography of Grunewald, the violence of popular German art,
especially in the field of graphic reproduction; the fact that, for
instance, of the seven 'horrid' novels Jane Austen mentions in
Northanger Abbey two are actual translations from the German, and four
others are set in Germany; the popularity of stories such as that of Struwwelpeler all point to a continuity of interest in the macabre. John
Willett, in his lively history of Expressionism, makes the point that
the poet Johannes Becher, a leading figure in literary Expressionism,
could quote with approval this passage from the seventeenth-century poet
Andreas Gryphius:
Oh the cry!
Murder! Death! Misery! Torments! Cross! Rack!
Worms! Fear! Pilch! Torture! Hangman!
Flame! Stink! Cold!
Ghosts! Despair! 0! Pass by! Deep and
high!
Sea! Hills! Mountains! Cliff! Pain no man can bear!
Engulf, engulf, abyss! those endless cries you hear.
It could well be a catalogue of Expressionist iconography.
Reinforced by its self-imposed function as the guardian of the West
against the Slavonic hordes, nourished by the horrors of the Thirty
Years War, the German spirit alternated between apocalyptic idealism and
intellectual masochism. The patterns of history did little to relieve
these tensions. Between its beginnings as a united nation in 1870, and
the advent of Hitler some sixty years later, it endured the hysterical
imperialism of the Hohenzollerns, the privations of the Great War, the
miseries of inflation, the tragedies of the Weimar experiment.
Catastrophe or the millennium seemed always to be on the horizons of
German experience. The music of Wagner and of Richard Strauss; the
writings of Nietzsche and Heinrich Mann; the plays of Strindberg (which
were very popular in Germany) and Wedekind, all nourished that sense of
revolutionary emotional turbulence which drove the artists of Berlin,
Munich, Dresden and Vienna far beyond the limits reached by their more
restrained contemporaries west of the Rhine. In Germany, to an extent
unknown in any other country, Expressionism dominated painting and
sculpture, literature, the theatre and the cinema.
Unlike France, with its strong traditions of unified political history
and centralization, Germany still retained that regionalism which the
creation of the Empire under Prussian rule had hidden rather than
destroyed. Although the first stirring of a new movement in the arts was
nourished by the presence in Germany during the 1890s of Munch who had a
succes de scandale at the exhibition of the Verein der Berliner Kunstler
(a dominantly Impressionist body) in 1892, and by the steadily widening
influence of Gauguin and of Van Gogh, its final realization was regional
rather than national.
Die Brucke ('The Bridge'), which has justly been described as
commencing more like a revolutionary cell than an art movement, was
founded in 1905 by four refugees from the school of architecture at
Dresden, the capital of Saxony. They had no experience of painting, but
they saw in it a means of liberation, a medium for expressing a social
message. In the programme which one of them,
Ernst Kirchner,
composed and engraved on wood for the group in 1906, he wrote:
'Believing as we do in growth, and in a new generation, both of those
who create and those who enjoy, we call all young people together, and
as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom
for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established
forces. We claim as our own everyone who reproduces directly, and
without falsification, whatever it is that drives him to create.'
Influenced by Van Gogh, by medieval German woodcuts, and by African and
Oceanic sculpture,
Kirchner was concerned with exploiting every
technical and compositional technique which could convey a sense of
immediate vivid sensation, mixing petrol into his oil paints so that
they dried quickly with a matt finish, excelling in watercolour, often
in conjunction with other media, applying bright local colour with small
brush-strokes. His chromatic inventiveness was, within his own context,
remarkably revolutionary: he would harmonize reds and blues, black and
purple, yellow and ochre, brown and cobalt blue. Indeed all his earlier
works show the self-education of an artist untrammelled by formal
education.
By 1911, therefore, when he and his friends decided to move to the more
metropolitan atmosphere of Berlin,
Kirchner had acquired considerable
technical skills, designed for his own purpose, but had not yet lost a
certain innocence of visual approach. All this is summed up in Semi-nude
Woman with Hat, painted in that year. Broad and simple in conception,
parsimonious almost in its range of colours, it is a simple dynamic
composition, depending on the use of contrasting and complementary arcs.
One series starts with the top of the hat and is continued through the
shoulders and arms. Another commences with the brim of the hat, is
half-echoed in the chin, doubled in the breasts, and concludes with the
lines of the blouse. As a counterpoint to this theme is another,
consisting of triangles; the first in the lower section of the hat where
it reveals the woman's forehead, the second, inverted at the throat, is
echoed in the armpits and the fingers of her left hand. The broadly
brushed-in background serves as a counterfoil to the figure, whose face,
while it suggests the influence of primitive sculpture, is also marked
by a kind of suggestive eroticism. The Expressionists as a whole were to
be enamoured of the Brechtian underworld of Berlin, with its whores,
pimps and gangsters who contrasted so strongly with the apparent simple
purity of their own dreamworld. How powerful the effect was on Kirchner
is especially apparent in works such as Five Women in the Street, in
which the ominous black figures, with their sinister, elongated bodies
and fantastic hats, are sited against a virulent green background,
which, though it retains a few elements of figurative observation, is
virtually abstract and of considerable compositional complexity.
Sculptural influences are again apparent; but the whole painting is
massively dedicated to representing the artist's own sense of projected
sin, Puritan in intention, passionate in expression. Significantly, five
years later, when on the verge of physical and mental collapse, he
wrote; T stagger to work, but all my work is in vain, and the mediocre
tears everything down in its onslaught. I'm now like the whores I used
to paint.'
After his breakdown he went to Switzerland, and there found annealing
but less emotive themes in the contemplation of landscape, and in the
idealization of those peasants of Davos whose staple industry for the
last century seems to have been the inspiration of neurasthenic
Northerners. Though still showing a certain violent grandeur of
conception, his post-war works never really lived up to the earlier
works, with their overriding sense of passionate apprehension.
Erich Heckel was in some ways more restrained than the other members of
Die Brucke, even though his technique was occasionally more
adventurous. His first paintings have the uncontrolled vehemence of the
newcomer overwhelmed by the freedom which art gives him, intoxicated by
the sense of apparently limitless power which it seems to confer on its
practitioners. Brickworks of 1907, for instance, has been painted by
squeezing oil out of the tubes straight on to the canvas, and using the
brush only to tidy up the total effect. Colours and forms swirl together
in a kind of pictorial storm. The visual impact — an extremely moving
one — has nothing to do with the actual theme; it is created entirely by
the medium, which has a life and movement all of its own. The pure,
undiluted pigment has the same vehemence as in some of Van Gogh's
paintings.
There was something touchingly idealistic - and German - in Heckel's
devotion to the concept of the group to which he belonged at this period
— reminiscent both of the ideals of the nineteenth-century Romantic
religious painters, the
Nazarenes, and of the less admirable duelling
clubs. It was he who procured their communal studios and organized their
first exhibition and their shared holidays on the Moritzburg lakes. In
1909
Heckel
travelled extensively in Italy, was impressed by Etruscan
art, fascinated by the idea of light, and set out to express in his work
those qualities of formal coherence which he had discovered south of the
Alps. The first fruit of this new inclination, and possibly his finest
painting, is the Nude on a Sofa, in which the singing colours and gently
hedonistic image are set off by the vigour of the composition and the
nervous, ecstatic brushwork. At first glance it is closer to the Fauves
than to their German Expressionist contemporaries, but no Frenchman
would have been quite so peremptory in his treatment of the feet, nor so
emotive in the handling of the walls and window. In a sense, Nude on a
Sofa exemplifies perfectly Kirchner's clarification of the original Brucke declaration: 'Painting is the art which represents a phenomenon
of feeling on a plane surface. The medium employed in painting, for both
background and line, is colour. The painter transforms a concept derived
from his own experiences into a work of art. He learns to make use of
his medium through continuous practice. There are no fixed rules for
this. The rules for any given work grow during its actual execution,
through the personality of the creator, his methods and technique, and
the message he is conveying. The perceptible joy in the object seen is,
from the beginning, the origin of all representational art. Today
photography reproduces an object exactly. Painting, liberated from the
need to do so, regains freedom of action. Instinctive transfiguration of
form, at the very instant of feeling, is put down on the flat surface on
impulse. The work of art is born from the total translation of personal
ideas in the execution.'
In fact, in becoming more surface-orientated, Heckel's work, with its
geometricized transcriptions of light and form, its sharp, angular
contours and its figurative stylization, became the virtual standard of
the Brucke contribution to the art of the twentieth century. It is
nevertheless exceptional in possessing strong human sympathies, which
have nothing to do with social protest, and an interest in narrative
which secured him a considerable degree of popular success long before
his fellow members achieved it.
Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff, the third member of Die Brucke, and the one who
invented the name for the group - the implication was that it provided a
link which held the group together, and led into the future -was in some
ways more single-minded than either of the other two. For several years
figures hardly ever appeared in his paintings. Introverted and reserved,
often in a state of latent hostility to some of his fellow-members, his
bold vigorous handling, vehement at times to the point of coarseness,
his heavily saturated colours and large undefined compositional areas,
brought him to the brink of pure abstraction. He was impassioned by the
sea, and a determinant influence on his art was the landscape of Norway,
which he visited frequently. Emil Nolde, whom he introduced
to the group, had helped him to achieve that transition from
Impressionism which was an almost essential episode in the development
of any Expressionist, but it was the move to Berlin, with its wider
horizons, its more explicit literary interests, which led him away from
landscapes to figures and still-lifes, to a more precise definition of
the subject matter, to a more fragmented and complex form of
composition, with the landscape reduced to a series of two-dimensional
symbols (as in Summer) against which the human figures appear as almost
primeval statues.
After the war
Schmidt-Rottluff's work became more lyrical, less vibrant,
and he took refuge in religious transcendentalism from the barbarism of
his age, moving to a kind of Symbolism with strong literary and
theological undercurrents. This was a common enough pattern at the time.
Similar conversions had affected the Decadents and other writers and
artists, who, relying initially too much on the absolute validity of
their own sensations, had tended to react violently in the opposite
direction when the inevitable disillusionment came. Forbidden to paint
by the Nazis, who confiscated his works, he was appointed in 1946 to a
professorship at the Berlin Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst.
Emil Hansen, who in 1901, at the age of thirty-four, changed his name to
Nolde,
was both the outsider and the professional of
Die Brucke. In
1898, while a drawing teacher at St Gallen in Switzerland, he decided to
become a full-time painter, and went to study with Adolf Holzel at a
small village near Munich which bore the still-innocent name of Dachau.
A Czech by birth, Holzel was, through his teachings and writings, a
figure of seminal significance in the evolution of contemporary art.
Deeply interested in problems of colour harmony, preoccupied with using
natural forms as the basis of a visual vocabulary, his writings had a
strong social bias, and he was one of the main contributors to the
significantly titled magazine Die Kunstfitr Alle ('Art for All'), which
was widely read throughout Europe.
After his contact with Holzel,
Emil Nolde spent some time in Paris, where he
was greatly impressed by the works of Daumier and Manet. Gradually his
Impressionistic technique widened under the combined influence of
Gauguin, Van Gogh and Munch, and by 1904 he was using brilliant colours,
laid on with an ecstatic disregard for the conventional techniques of
brushwork. These paintings inevitably attracted the attention of the
much younger artists of Die Briicke, who asked him to join them, and he
took part in the group exhibitions of 1906 and 1907. But he felt that
the group was too confined, too inhibiting, and tried to start a rival
association, more broadly based, and including Christian Rohlfs, Munch,
Matisse, Max Beckmann and Schmidt-Rottluff. This was abortive, and
equally unsuccessful was his attempt to take over the leadership of the
Neue Sezession in Berlin in 1911. Some forty years later he wrote: 'Munch's
work led to the founding of the Berlin Secession, my work to its
splitting and dissolution. Much sound and fury, both at the beginning
and the end. But all these irrelevancies soon pass; the essential alone
remains, the core - art itself.'
It is difficult to understand Nolde's artistic career without paying
attention to the deep pietistic side of his character. Sprung from a
simple farming background, he was in full accord with that religious
undercurrent which influenced men as disparate as Van Gogh and Bloy; and
once he confessed to his friend Friedrich Fehr; 'When I was a child,
eight or ten years old, I made a solemn promise to God that, when I grew
up, I would write a hymn for the prayer book. The vow has never been
fulfilled. But I have painted a large number of pictures, and there must
be more than thirty religious ones. I wonder if they will do instead.'
It was mainly to religious themes that he turned when he reverted to
figure painting in about 1909, having rejected it at the point of his
conversion from Impressionism. But though in works such as The Last
Supper of 1909 his figures are realistic in appearance, by the following
year they are translated in The Dance Round the Golden Calf into
hieroglyphs of Dionysiac ecstasy, violent in colour, jagged in shape,
dominating the landscape which retains the abstract qualities of his
first excursions into the Expressionist idiom. The outlines of the forms
are defined by the edges of the areas of colour, so helping to build up
an air of almost uncontrolled hysteria. Believing absolutely in the
validity of the instinctive reaction, the personal vision, Nolde's own
aesthetic credo expressed perfectly the romantic egocentricity of the
Expressionist stance: 'None of the free imaginative pictures that I
painted at this time [c. 1910], or later, had any kind of model, or even
a clearly conceived idea. It was quite easy for me to imagine a work
right down to its smallest details, and in fact my preconceptions were
usually far more beautiful than the painted outcome; I became the
copyist of the idea. Therefore I liked to avoid thinking about a picture
beforehand. All I needed was a vague idea about the sort of light
arrangement and colour I wanted. The painting then developed of its own
volition under my hands.'
Nolde was probably more deeply concerned with the implications and
significance of primitive art forms than were his younger
contemporaries. He began work on a book, Kunstausserungen der
Naturvolker ('Artistic Expressions of Primitive Peoples'), and in 1913
was invited to join an official expedition to the German colonies in the
Pacific, including New Guinea. From this experience he not only derived
new sanctions for his expression of what he described as 'the intense,
often grotesque expressions of force and life in the most basic form',
but came into contact with landscapes and climatic conditions more
violent than any he could have seen in Europe. Tropical Sun
of 1914,
which comes close to the kind of work
Wassily Kandinsky was producing at
about the same time, combines the sharp impact of intensely disturbing
colours with forms which have a suggestive, cosmic, almost primeval
vehemence.
After the outbreak of war, Nolde withdrew very largely from the
contemporary art scene, and the first big exhibition of his work took
place in 1927, when he was sixty, with Paul Klee providing the
introduction to the catalogue. In this he wrote: 'Abstract artists, far
removed from this world, or fugitives from it, sometimes forget that
Nolde exists. Not so I. No matter how far I may fly away from it I
always manage to find my way back to earth, to find security in its
solidity. Nolde is more than of the earth; he is its guardian spirit. No
matter where one may be, one is always aware of one's kinship with him,
a kinship based on deep immutable things.'
Nolde too suffered greatly under the Nazis, but received some degree of
official rehabilitation by receiving the prize for painting at the 1952
Venice Biennale, four years before his death.
Max Pechstein had been an extremely successful student of decorative art
before he joined
Die Brucke in 1906, and in the following year he was
awarded the Rome prize for painting by the Kingdom of Saxony. He was
above all else a professional, resolved, for economic and psychological
reasons, to make a success of his chosen occupation. No innovator,
comparatively untouched by the wilder waves of aesthetic passion which
buffeted his contemporaries, he used their discoveries to evolve a style
of painting which combined brightness of palette, freedom of line, and
freshness of approach with decorative decorum. And this was no bad
thing. Every art movement needs men such as Pechstein who can mould its
discoveries and innovations into an acceptable visual syntax; Raphael
did something of the sort for the Renaissance, just as Pissarro did for
the Impressionists, and Dufy and Van Dongen for the Fauves. Like Nolde,
Pechstein went on a trip to the Pacific, but it neither exacerbated his
sensitivities nor inflamed his emotions. Paintings such as Nude in a
Tent, one of the many he produced in the course of his yearly summer
holidays on the Baltic, suggest the elegance of his line, the delicacy
of his colour. His motivations were too trouble-free for him ever to
have achieved the agonized vulnerability of his colleagues. 'I want to
express my desire for happiness. I do not want to be ever regretting
missed opportunities. Art is... the part of my life which has brought
me the greatest joy.'
Otto
Mueller, like Nolde, was older and more experienced in the arts
when he joined Die Brucke than were Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff or
Heckel. Supposedly of partly gypsy extraction (Romany themes were to
have a special attraction for him), he commenced as a lithographer, and
then studied painting at the Dresden Academy. The most important
formative influence on him during his early years was that of the
writers Carl and Gerhart Hauptmann, whose works had close affinities
with literary Expressionism, and with whom he travelled extensively in
Italy and elsewhere. He was also greatly attracted by the paintings of
the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin, whose dream-like fantasies, replete
with strange emotional undertones, had an important influence on all
those artists who effected the transition between nineteenth-century
empiricism and twentieth-century subjectivism. Kirchner wrote in his
journal: 'If one now traces Bocklin's work in Basle from its beginnings,
one finds such a pure line of artistic development that one cannot but
acknowledge his great talent. It progresses confidently, without
divergence or hesitation, straight from value painting to coloured two-dimensionalism.
It is the same path that Rembrandt took, and the moderns such as Nolde
or Kokoschka, and it is probably the only right path in painting.'
Mueller's own works during this period - he later destroyed most
of them - seem to have been predominantly Symbolist in content,
if not in form, and he was very conscious of Egyptian
influences. In 1910, he joined
Die Brucke at the age of thirty-six. By then his style had become more or
less fixed. His favourite theme was the female nude, which he treated
without a great deal of distortion; his colouring was subdued, almost at
times monochromatic, and this feeling of nostalgic reticence was
enhanced by his concern with securing a fresco-like effect, mainly by
the use of coarse canvas and various combinations of oil paint, gouache
and glue. On the whole Mueller's work has much of the decorative nature
of Pechstein's, and he played a similar role in disseminating the visual
discoveries of artists more radical than himself.
|
|
Germany:
Der Blaue Reiter
By comparison with
Die Brucke, the other important group of German
Expressionists,
Der Blaue Reiter ('The Blue Rider') was larger, more
amorphous, more changing in its membership, but more ideological in its
approach, more concerned with exploring man's relationship to his world;
and so in the long run its members tended to have greater influence in
the avant-garde. Several of them - Klee and
Kandinsky are the obvious
examples - went on to explore new visual territories and open up new
dimensions of experience. The name of the group originated in a
conversation between two of its founders. In 1930
Wassily Kandinsky
recalled: "Franz Marc and I chose this name as we were having coffee one
day on the shady terrace of Sindelsdorf. Both of us liked blue, Marc for
horses, I for riders. So the name came by itself.'
It is hard to disentangle all the manoeuvrings and dissensions among the
young artists of Munich which led to the foundation of the group.
Kandinsky had been painting and teaching in that city since 1896, and
had been the main driving force in the creation of various progressive
groups, but when in 1911 one of these rejected his Last Judgment, he and
Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter, which held a series of exhibitions in
Munich and Berlin and published an 'almanac' or year book,
Der Blaue Reiter, whose one and only issue included essays and reviews about all
the arts, and numbered among its contributors Schonberg, Webern and
Berg, and among its illustrations, folk art, children's drawings and
works by Cezanne, Matisse, Douanier Rousseau, the Briicke group, Van
Gogh and Delaunay. Indeed, Der Blaue Reiter was cosmopolitan in its
membership and affiliations, including in one or other of these
categories Russians such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova;
Frenchmen such as Braque, Derain, Picasso and Robert Delaunay; and the
Swiss Louis-Rene Moilliet and Henry Bloe Niestle.
But, whatever stylistic allegiances
Der Blaue Reiter commanded, and
however divergent the paths which its members later followed, it was in
its conception and short life - the group dispersed in 1914 -
essentially German in origin, Expressionist in nature. In the Prospectus
to the catalogue of the first exhibition at the Thannhauser gallery in
Munich we find another statement of those familiar ideals: 'To give
expression to inner impulses in every form which provokes an intimate
personal reaction in the beholder. We seek today, behind the veil of
external appearances, the hidden things which seem to us more important
than the discoveries of the Impressionists. We search out and elaborate
this hidden side of ourselves not from caprice nor for the sake of being
different, but because this is the side we see.'
But by and large, the members of Der Blaue Reiter were more rigorous and
more searching in their attitudes than were most of their
contemporaries. They investigated colour theories, became concerned with
problems of perception, flirted fruitfully with the physical sciences (Kandinsky
owed much to the microscope), explored imaginary space and declared
their independence of the boundaries of the visible world. Deeply
influenced by the philosophical speculations of Wilhelm Worringer, whose
Abstraktion und Einfuhling ('Abstraction and Empathy') was published in
1907, several of them wrote persuasively in creative forms. Their
approach to art was interdisciplinary in a way which had not been seen
since the Renaissance.
Wassily Kandinsky was born and educated in Russia, and having in 1895
been converted to art by seeing an exhibition of the French
Impressionists in Moscow, came to Munich, to devote himself entirely to
painting, at a time when that city was the centre of the so-called New
Style of art in Germany. He expressed himself in a wide variety of media
(forecasting in his concern with the decorative arts his future
involvement with the Bauhaus), designing clothing, tapestries and
handbags. His painting was at this point predominantly Art Nouveau with
Symbolist undercurrents, but already possessing allusive, emotive
qualities. Travelling extensively, he was widely recognized, and he
received medals in Paris in 1904 and 1905, was elected to the jury of
the Salon d'Automne, and won a Grand Prix in 1906.
But during this period stronger, more vital impulses began to be
apparent in his work. He digested the influence of Cezanne, Matisse and
Picasso; he began to understand the value of Bavarian folk art; his
colours began to sing; visible shapes began to lose their descriptive
qualities. In paintings such as On the Outskirts of the City of 1908 the
actual subject matter is of slight importance; indeed, it is positively
irrelevant. What matters is the sense of dynamism which controls the
cumulus-like groups of strongly contrasting colours; 'Houses and trees
made hardly any impression on my thoughts. I used the palette knife to
spread lines and splashes of paint on the canvas, and make them sing as
loudly as I could. My eyes were filled with the strong saturated colours
of the light and air of Munich, and the deep thunder of its shadows.'
This was a crucial moment in the history of modern art. The Dionysiac
freedom of Expressionism was being suffused with another element, the
metaphysical tradition of Russian Byzantinism, with its strong
anti-naturalistic, hieratic tendencies. From 1910 onwards Kandinsky
continued painting pictures in which representational elements were
still discernible; but side by side with these were works such as the
Large Study of 1914, in which forms as well as colours have taken off
into a world of their own, owing little to any recognizable visual
phenomena - even though he did find some difficulty in creating an
entirely abstract iconography. In the famous apologia which he published
in 1910, Uber das Geistige in der Kunst, ('Concerning the Spiritual in
Art'), he used the word geistig, usually translated as 'spiritual', to
describe the unreal elements in his paintings; perhaps today we would
incline towards translating it by some adjective involving a suggestion
of the psychological. These whirling shapes move across the canvas like
dancing Dervishes, suggesting impulses deeper than those 'emotional'
impulses which powered the main stream of Expressionism. His subsequent
career indicated the extent to which he was constantly motivated by the
desire to achieve a synthesis of thought and feeling, science and art,
logic and intuition.
All his achievements were rooted in the original liberating experience
of Expressionism, but there were others, less cosmopolitan in their
upbringing, less vigorous in their empiricism, who never shook off their
early dependence on a framework of naturalistic references. Whether this
would have been true of
Franz
Marc it is impossible to say; he was
killed at Verdun in his mid thirties, at a moment when he seemed to be
reaching a point of evolution which his friend Kandinsky had arrived at
a few years earlier. There was a strongly obsessive quality about his
imagination, perhaps not unconnected with his religious preoccupations.
He had started off as a theology student before turning to painting,
which he looked upon as a spiritual rather than a worldly activity.
Bowled over by Impressionism, he devoted himself for several years to
the study of animal anatomy, and even gave lessons on the subject.
Although these studies were undertaken primarily to evolve general
principles of form from the close examination of the particular, they
assumed a special emotional significance for him in his devotion to the
horse - that symbol so loved by advertising agents and adolescent girls.
To him animals came to represent a sort of primeval purity, each
signifying some admirable strength or desirable virtue: the deer fragile
agility, the tiger restrained, latent strength. Although at first he
painted animals in the foreground of his pictures, later they became
integrated with the landscape, as though he were seeking a complete
identification of both.
Having secured expressive forms, he went on, under the influence of his
friend
August
Macke, another member of Der Blaue Reiter, who of all the
group came closest to the Fauves, to explore the emotional potentials of
colour. 'If you mix red and yellow to make orange, you turn passive
yellow into a Fury, with a sensual force that again makes cool spiritual
blue indispensable. In fact blue always finds its place inevitably at
the side of orange. The colours love each other. Blue and orange make a
thoroughly festive sound.'
The sexual undertones, the rather childish symbolism, the strong sense
of personalization - all are typical of Marc, and of his generation. His
colour experiments were leading to a dissolution of form similar to that
being achieved by
Kandinsky, when his death cut them short.
Like Kandinsky a Russian by birth,
Alexei von Jawlensky was closely
associated with
Der Blaue Reiter, but did not participate in any of
their joint exhibitions. Though he was later to grow close to Nolde, the
formative influences on his work up to about 1912 were those of Gauguin,
Matisse and Van Dongen. His warm and passionate painting depended
largely on simplification, brilliant colours held within dark contours,
and a bounding sinuous line, which gives a hieratic unity to the whole
composition. The impact of the war led to an exaggeration of that taste
for religious mysticism which he shared with Marc and others. 'Art' he
said 'is nostalgia for God', and after 1917 the hulk of his work
consisted of tetes mystiques - abstract head forms.
Although Expressionism in general, and the Blaue Reiter (in whose
exhibitions he participated) were of great importance in the development
of the art of
Paul Klee, his approach to both was tentative, marked by
that sense of hesitation which characterized the whole of his early
career. Right from the beginning he had been, by instinct as it were, a
linear Expressionist, producing graphic forms which paid little
attention to naturalistic conventions, and which were bent or distorted
to convey a sense of whimsical irony, even of gentle sadism -
emphasizing the debt which non-realist art owed to the traditions of
caricature. Line for him was an independent structural element which he
deployed to express strong sensations. But his contacts with
Der Blaue Reiter led him to assume enough courage to explore the potentials of colour. He took the final step in 1914 when on a trip to Tunisia with
Macke and Moilliet. It
was the outcome of a long process rather than a moment of sudden
conversion. In effect, he was an introvert who schooled himself to
become an extrovert, a classicist who turned to romanticism (he always
confessed to preferring Cezanne to Van Gogh). But, even so, it was in
the compromise medium of watercolour that he was happiest, and that he
made the most advances. In works such as The Fohn Wind in the Marcs'
Garden of 1915, perfunctory gestures to perspectival space can still be
seen, and he was never completely to renounce references to objective
reality; he regarded it as a source of materials from which to create a
personal imagery rather than as a model to be copied. Complex, subtle
and lyrical, the picture is composed of roughly geometric sections each
containing its own colour, the different shapes forming a contrapuntal
flat pattern which moves up and across the surface of the paper.
At the opposite pole of Expressionism, but within the same milieu,
Alfred
Kubin represented a tradition very different from the delicate
happy fantasies of Klee. Mainly an illustrator, his imagination was
nurtured on the morbid, and he gave shape to the nightmares of anxiety
in a style which owed something to Beardsley, something to Goya, and a
good deal to Odilon Redon. The author of a strange novel, Die andere
Seite ('The Other Side'), he reasserted in the twentieth century the
'Gothic' traditions of the early nineteenth.
|
|
|
Der Sturm: Berlin and Vienna
It would be wrong, of
course, to think of the experiments of
Die
Brucke and the
Blaue Reiter
as the sole manifestations of the new visual romanticism which
was sweeping through the German-speaking countries. In both
Berlin and Vienna powerful Secession movements -anti-academies,
beset by schisms - gathered the progressive elements in the arts
into an uneasy alliance. Not all of these elements, even within
the Expressionist idiom, would have subscribed to the radical
theories of Kandinsky or Marc, and within the pages of art
journals such as Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm (which was
largely responsible for publicizing the notion of Expressionism
as a movement) bitter controversies raged about the extent to
which traditional attitudes should be accepted or rejected. A
typical figure in this context was that of
Max
Beckmann,
who commenced as an instinctual Expressionist working in a style
which owed a good deal to Munch and even to Delacroix, and
taking as his themes subjects such as his mother's deathbed, the
Messina earthquake of 1910, or the sinking of the Titanic.
He emphasized, especially in the course of a lengthy controversy
with Marc, which appeared in the magazine Pan in 1912, the
traditional qualities of paint: 'Appreciation for the peach-coloured
sheen of skin, the glint of a nail, for what is artistically
sensual; for those things such as the softness of flesh, the
gradations of space, which lie not only on the surface of a
picture, but in its depths. Appreciation too for the attraction
of the material. The rich gloss of oil paint which we find in
Rembrandt, in Cezanne; the inspired brushwork of Frans Hals.'
A conversion which no aesthetic dialectics could bring about was
effected by his traumatic experiences as a medical orderly —
experiences which not only caused him to have a nervous
breakdown, but also made his style into a medium appropriate for
expressing their bitter content. The tormented anguish of the
Self-portrait with a Red Scarf of 1917 is expressed
not only in the appearance of the face and in the pose, but in
the cramped space, the acrid colours, the dryness of handling —
far removed from his earlier delight in quality of pigment and
sensuality of texture. Producing for the rest of his career
mainly figure paintings, including many self-portraits, he
presented them as symbols of pure despair, essays in
existentialist agony.
Lyonel Feininger
and
Oskar Kokoschka
presented differing but complementary antitheses to Beckmann's
pessimistic passion; the one was inventive in style, the other
predominantly traditionalist; both were much more joyous in
content.
Feininger,
who rejected groups and never participated in a manifesto,
openly declared himself an Expressionist: 'Every work I do
serves as an expression of my most personal state of mind at
that particular moment, and of the inescapable, imperative need
for release by means of an appropriate act of creation, in the
rhythm, form, colour and mood of the picture.'
In fact, his
inspiration derived mainly from the Cubists, and to a lesser
degree from the Futurists; it was the first two qualities,
rhythm and form, which were most apparent in his work. Geometric
in construction, with metamorphosized figurative elements, his
works are sharper than those of Robert Delaunay, with which they
have considerable affinities. The colour is brooding, the
subject matter larger in scale than the average French Cubist
would have attempted; the analysis into geometric units is
complete and thorough, taking in every element in the painting
-including even the light in the sky. It was light which
contributed the major Expressionist element to his works,
wrapping them in a sense of mystery and drama, making them,
despite the austerity of the style, emotionally disturbing.
More self-confident in
its hedonistic cosmopolitanism than Berlin, the capital of the
Austro-Hungarian empire had experienced in the closing decades of the
nineteenth century a Secession movement dominated by the Byzantine
sensuality of Gustav Klimt's paintings. The emotionally liberated
principles which underlay the movement were disseminated throughout
Europe in the pages of the magazine Ver sacrum which greatly influenced
Die Brucke.
Stylistically
Egon
Schiele,
one of Klimt's pupils, who was briefly imprisoned for producing what
were described as 'pornographic' drawings, depended very much on the
luscious linear vitality of Klimt's art, but he added to it a pungent
morbidity of his own which is heightened by elegant formal distortions.
Even his oil paintings have something of the quality of watercolour, and
he found special pleasure in this medium, using it originally for
subjects with a marked erotic appeal, but later - especially in those
works which he produced in prison -expressing a tormented anguish of
spirit.
Egon
Schiele
Portrait
of the Painter
Paris von Gutersloh
|
Egon
Schiele
For My
Art and for My Loved Ones I Will Gladly Endure to
the End!
|
|
A good deal is
often made of the fact that
Kokoschka
grew up in the Vienna of Sigmund Freud, and his concern with
portraiture - rare in the avant-garde of the twentieth century -
is often related to his desire to penetrate beneath the disguise
of appearance to the sitter's inner personality. But the effects
which critics tend to attribute to psychological penetration are
more likely to have been determined by the stylistic attitudes
which he formed in the period between 1910 and 1914 when his
thin, tortuous linear patterns were reinforced by a passion for
rich, heavy impasto through which figures emerge, and by means
of which they are defined. In one of his more famous works of
this period, The Bride of the Wind (Die Windsbraut),
all the qualities which have made his work so popular and so
significant are immediately apparent: an immense capacity for
visual rhetoric, which can at times descend to pomposity; an
ability to contain within a single composition the most
disparate elements; and a sense of Baroque vitality. The
historical analogy is significant; for throughout his career
Kokoschka basically worked within the framework of traditional
Renaissance and post-Renaissance conventions, even favouring the
same kind of scale. In The Bride of the Wind there are obvious
references to El Greco and to Delacroix; the size conforms to
that of the grandes machines of Rubens or Poussin (it is 181 x
220 cm), and there are no striking innovations in form or
construction. What is special to Kokoschka's generation and the
Expressionist tradition of art is the apocalyptic treatment of
the theme, the morbidity of the colour, and the adaptation of
the actual handling of the medium to create a mood.
It is
interesting in this connection to compare
Kokoschka's
painting with one of several which his younger contemporary
Max Ernst
produced on the same theme — significantly, the Germans use the
word Windsbraut to mean 'Storm Wind' - in the 1920s.
Expressionism had been the force which initially liberated
Ernst,
and his early works before the war were well within its idiom.
But after his encounter with the Nihilism of Dada he turned to
the Surrealist liberation of unconscious imagery.
In his Bride of the Wind the sense of violence,
aggression and disquiet is expressed formally in a style which
contains all the basic elements of the Expressionists - emotive
colour, turbulent shapes distorted to provoke strong reactions
in the spectator - and added to them is a whole series of sexual
metaphors, involving the sense of rape, the whole effect
heightened by the contrast with the placid lunar circle.
After the Great War
The political ferment which characterized the post-war years in Germany
gave aesthetic allegiances even stronger political undertones than those
they had already expressed. Powerful though the appeals of Dada and
Futurism were, it was Expressionism which commanded the big aesthetic
battalions, and which became identified most clearly with all the
progressive elements in the tragedy of the Weimar republic. Even the
older painters were inspired by its fervour; and
Lovis Corinth, whose
vigorous Impressionism had inspired Nolde and Macke, now abandoned this
for a charged, violent emotional style - with strong social
undercurrents — closer to that of his disciples than to that of his
predecessors.
The temper of the times also gave fresh impetus to the interest which
the Expressionists had always shown in graphic media - with their
propaganda potential being transferred from aesthetic to political ends.
The reasons for this interest were many and complex. The stylistic
innovations pioneered by Crane and William Morris; the growing
popularity of illustrated books; the impact of Beardsley, of Gauguin and
of Lucien Pissarro, each of whom in his own way had extended the range
of prints and engravings, was reinforced by a contemporary interest in
the tradition of the popular German woodcut of the late Middle Ages,
with its strong democratic appeal. It was this influence which led
artists such as Nolde, Heckel and Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) to produce
works in black and white, simple in composition, urgent in emotional
appeal, with perspectival effects created by the interrelation of
planes, and arrogantly devoid of any attempt to please or charm.
The desire to rape rather than to seduce the spectator's sensibilities,
which was inherent in many Expressionist works, seemed especially
relevant in the 1920s; and it was seen at its most compelling in an
artist who, though belonging at one point to the Berlin Dadaists, was at
heart committed to the stylistic manners of the Expressionists, using
visual violence to excoriate the establishment and propagate his own
democratic ideas.
George Grosz recorded, with a bitter brilliance which
has never been excelled, the unacceptable face of capitalism. He
produced a flood of lithographs, prints and paintings which document
post-war Germany with the same virulent accuracy with which Daumier
portrayed the France of Louis-Philippe. But his strength was his
weakness, and though his colour could often be gently lyrical, he could
never seem to overcome a basic distaste for humanity, despite the
democratic ideals which informed his work. He was always best at his
most sadistic, and he exemplifies, in an exaggerated form, the strong
streak of Puritanical venom which frequently powers the Expressionist
imagination. The Expressionists had led the last attack on the ramparts
of rationality, and had breached them. They gave to instinct a standing
in the visual arts which the Romantics had never succeeded in
establishing; they declared their independence of the visible world, and
gave the subconscious a new significance in the act of creation. The
actual techniques which they had evolved were used by many artists to
achieve effects not dissimilar from those which they themselves sought.
The strong simple colours and passionate vision which characterize the
works of a basically Fauve painter such as Matthew Smith (1879-1959)
represent one aspect of a tradition which complements the more personal
emotional vehemence of an artist such as Jack Yeats, whose concern with
a semi-private mythology echoes through thick layers of luminous paint
applied with a vigorous, whirling brush stroke. Nor would any member of
Die Brucke or Der Blaue Reiter see in the sun-drenched, fiercely
expressed imagery of the Australian Arthur Boyd anything very different
from what he himself had been trying to achieve.
The passion for violence, the search for ultimates in sensation and
feeling which could yet be confined within the traditional framework of
painting are yet another aspect of the legacy of Expressionism, and the
resemblances between
Francis Bacon's
Study of Red Pope and
Chaim Soutine's
Pageboy at Maxim's are more than fortuitous. Both are
motivated by the desire to express in the resonances of colour, in the
deformation of lines, in the exaggeration of physical characteristics, a
sensational impact experienced by the artist, impressed on the
spectator.
At the same time, too, as painters had been moving towards a mode of
creativity based on the creative significance of passion, so the
aestheticians and the critics were providing new theoretical bases for
establishing that infallibility of the id which was one of the tacit
assumptions of the Expressionist approach. John Russell, for instance,
sets out to explain (and in a sense to vindicate) Bacon's multi-planed
distorted imagery in terms of the notion of 'unconscious scanning' which
Anton Ehrenzweig formulated in The Hidden Order of Art (1967), and which
is a continuation of an Expressionist theory of creativity first
formulated by Worringer fifty years earlier. Rationalization, control,
restraint, analysis, are converted into psychological sins; spontaneity,
the rejection of conscious vision, 'the chaos of the subconscious', the
undifferentiated structure of subliminal perception, are virtues.
The moralistic undertones are obvious, and this was to be emphasized by
the fact that when, with the advent of the New York school of Abstract
Expressionism, the critic Clement Greenberg set out to provide it with a
rationale, he did so virtually in terms of the notion that, because of
the absolute spontaneity of works dictated by pure gestural chance, they
achieve a kind of liberating truth which is at once virtuous and
therapeutic. And this notion has gone far, spilling over into the
conduct of life as 'doing your own thing' and making possible the cult
of contemporary culture-heroes such as Joseph Beuys.
Nor are the earlier formal impulses of Expressionism yet exhausted. The
art brut of a painter such as Jean Dubuffet shows a conscious intention
to assault the eye, and he himself has said about the Corps de Dame
series: 'I have always delighted (and I think this delight is constant
in all my paintings) in contrasting in these feminine bodies the
extremely general and the extremely particular; the metaphysical and the
grotesquely trivial.'
Willem de Kooning is one of those who, turning
their backs on the earlier purely abstract phases of their careers, have
reverted to inspirations which would not have been alien to the early
Expressionists.
But to limit the contemporary significance of Expressionism to the
occasional survival of its stylistic mannerisms would be to underrate
it. More than any other single episode in the history of art during the
last century it has emancipated painting, extended the boundaries of
form, line and colour, made possible the impossible. Nothing in art that
has happened since its beginnings has been untouched by its liberating
effect.
|
|
