“Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a going down. I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a down-going, for they are those who are going across. I love the great despisers for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore.”
Fredrick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
“Art that is anarchic and nihilistic as dada was, does not need to be taught in a school; but if it is, there is no particular harm… But some art is threatened and even destroyed by studio classrooms. A prime example is German expressionism and the various expressionisms that have developed from it… German expressionism, and some other kinds of German expressionisms that developed from it… depended on not thinking about some questions that art students everywhere learn to think about… German expressionism, and some other kinds of expressionism, depend on not thinking about the kinds of things that are routinely taught in studio-classes… (From a teacher’s point of view, it’s hard to imagine how to teach such a style to artists except by putting them under some kind of hypnosis and asking them to forget everything they know..).. when I was teaching the art history survey, I used to tell the Neo-Expressionist students to drop out of school. I think I’d still say that if I were teaching the survey today: it’s the only honest thing to do.”
James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, P.76 &78, 2001.
Expressionism more than any artistic movement dismays and baffles the public who cannot understand why someone would want to draw and paint so ‘badly’ and make such ‘ugly’ work. They are also baffled that such artists are admired by the art establishment. Expressionist art seems to the ignorant public to attack all their accepted notions of truth, beauty, and art. Even conceptual art is often more admired because it confirms an intellectual and rational view of art and the world. Moreover, the character of the Expressionist artist is also attacked as immature, narcissistic, egotistical, monstrous, and even insane.
Yet, since the age of fifteen, my favourite artists bar-none, have been Expressionists. I understood instinctively at fifteen that the way you looked at the world depended completely upon your psychological and emotional state. If you felt alienated, and anguished, even the most beautiful thing in the world - could take on a mocking horror. I may have come three or four generations after the proto-Expressionists and Expressionists, yet their art spoke to me as directly as if it had been painted in my day. It was a love so great it went on to encompass, Gothic, Baroque, Tribal, Outsider and Neo-Expressionist artists. My love of Expressive art is only matched, by my contempt for all but the very best intellectual or academic art.
I have based this small introduction - not on any one specific exhibition I have seen, but rather on a lifetime of looking at Expressionist art in museums, reading hundreds of books on the subject, and trying to live by its high standards of personal expression.
My favourite book on the subject was and is Michel Ragon’s L’Expressionism, published in Lausanne and Geneva in 1966 - with an introduction by Pierre Courtion. In translation, it formed part of my father’s Heron History of Art collection in our home in Howth. So, I have owned it for over fifty-two years, and it is a book so precious to me that I have kept it by my bedside throughout my life.
Ragon’s book was a populist introduction to the art of Expressionism, with an emphasis placed on the broad manifestation of Expressionism throughout Europe. Today, books on Expressionism usually talk of Expressionism as a totally German phenomenon, but as Ragon and others have shown, Expressionism was also a broader movement of loners around northern Europe. Edvard Munch was highlighted as the true father of Expressionism while Matisse’s importance is shown to be more limited. Yet at the same time, the book gave great importance to those isolated immigrants in Paris like Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine and Pascin who had developed highly personal and expressive modes of painting.
Pierre Courtion described the nature of Expressionism in the intro: “I hate the movement that displaces lines, said the poet. The Expressionist artist could be said to affirm the opposite. Expressionism is to the eye what a scream is to hearing. Surely this is an artist’s basic gift? “Expression comes long before execution and design”, wrote Diderot in his Salon of 1776. In order to achieve this execution and design, the artist must practise repetitiously, keep to the rules and draw on his experience, whereas his initial instinct is to affirm his individuality straight away. Art, to remain vital, must constantly have its balance reassessed and reorganized, and like the air-bubble in the carpenter’s level, it can never be steady for long. Deriving in certain ways from Baroque, of which it was a technical extension, Expressionism gave new life and vigour to a conventional art. Like Baroque, Romanticism and Realism, Expressionism has always been present as a homoeopathic dose in the creation of all important art.” (Pierre Courthion, Expressionism, Heron History of Art, 1968, P.7.)
The tedious academic Merit Werenskiold (b.1942) in her anal work ‘The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses’, (1984) attacked Ragon’s books historical inaccuracy and overplaying of Expressionisms origin in protest and screams of expression. It was a strange claim made by one of the worst authors on Expressionism I have ever read. For I agreed with Ragon when he declared: “Expressionism is the opposite of art for art’s sake. Human problems always assume much greater importance in it than artistic ones. That is at once its strength and its weakness. In trying to demonstrate too much and shout too loud, Expressionism has sometimes slid into caricature, a danger which Van Gogh dreaded in his own paining. But all art contain an intrinsic risk of failure: Expressionism’s stumbling-block as caricature, as Abstract art’s was decorativeness. Only the great creators were able to avoid these pitfalls... Expressionism is primarily a protest, an outcry by young men torn apart by their aspirations and the strict morality of a moribund society which thought it was immortal.” (Michel Ragon, Expressionism, Heron History of Art, 1968, P.11.)
The fundamental difference between Michel Ragon and Merit Wernskiold, was between; being a real human being in love with art and artists and wise about the human condition, and being an academic; ignorant of how to actually make art, dependent entirely on second hand texts, and utterly ignorant of what it is to live in the world. Ragon’s book made the inner lives of these artists come alive, while Werenskiold’s reduced the whole movement to a shuffling of critical texts.
Wereskiold’s book claimed to be a scientific analysis of the history of Expressionism, yet that aim left me utterly enraged. Why in God’s name would you want to talk about art based on emotional intensity, in the dry nit-picking manner of a bookkeeper!
Yes, Ragon’s book was histrionic, hyperbolic and over the top in its prose, but that was in fact the best way to treat this particular subject! All of this brought home to me why so many artists have had contempt for the writings produced off the fumes of their canvases.
As a youth, I was unashamedly partisan in my belief that Expressionism was a profoundly anti-academic, anti-art-market, anti-social and anti-authoritarian movement. However, while many of its masters were tortured, many like Munch and Kirchner were also industrious self-promotors. Although there was a fad for Expressionism in the 1910s and 1980s by and large it is a tendency that has been loathed by art world insiders and a subject for mockery for the public. Moreover, success for these artists often resulted in a loss of vision, and critics have been quick to neutralize it in texts. As Donald Kuspit has pointed out: “...Expressionist emotions seem uncontainable, to the extent that they stretch the limits of social respectability and subvert social intelligibility – undermine the social mask we all wear – as though asserting their autonomous existence. For the Expressionists the primordial self – the true creative bodily self, in contrast to the false compliant social self, to use Donald Winnicott’s distinction – is incommunicado. Nonetheless, it can be expressed in the “eureka” moment of creativity.” (Donald Kuspit, The Inner Conflict of Expression, Expressive!, Foundation Beyeler, 2003, P. 12.) Just as learning the three cords of the Blues will not make you a Blues musician - so you cannot teach yourself how to be an Expressionist – you are either one or you are not. Anxiety and despair are hard to fake, since by their very nature they born of character under stress, born from events out of one’s control. Even for Expressionist painters there are periods of creative block when the paints have to be put away in defeat - and time spent in despairing thought and hopes of another period of creative release.
No other group of painters and draughtsmen have so deeply affected my art and life, and their influence is clear in all my work. Their high standards of undiluted vision, integrity, perseverance, spiritual questing, moral questioning, and social critique - shaped my concept of what it meant to be an artist. The look, feel, subject and content of my art would have never been the same, if it were not for expressive artists like; van Gogh, Schiele, Munch, Kirchner, Pollock, de Kooning, Bacon, Baselitz, Schnabel and Basquiat. So, I would like to give a brief overview of this movement and in particular its emergence in Germany and the artists of Die Bucke.
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Expressionism is one of the most misunderstood and shapeless movements in Modern Art. The word became so loaded that many early Expressionist artists like Emil Nolde and Max Beckman, Francis Bacon and Neo-Expressionists like Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel tried to avoid its implications and limitations. Expressionism is the ultimate in self-sufficiency and self-involvement, which is fine on a personal level, but it makes it difficult to make a public career for oneself, which is why those who later found success had to broaden their art out from the Expressionist cul-de-sac. In fact, no group ever called itself Expressionist, or wrote a manifesto of Expressionism.
It has often been seen as an aberration of modernism, a regional form of reactionary art. Clement Greenberg wrote; “Picasso’s good luck was to have come to French modernism directly, without the intervention of any other kind of modernism. It was perhaps Kandinsky’s bad luck to have to go through German modernism first.” (Bassie, Ashley Expressionism. Kent: Grange Books, P. 47, 2005.) This was no casual remark, Greenberg loathed Expressionism even when he could not avoid it in the work of artists he admired like Pollock. Was this in part because of his Jewish heritage and the horrific crimes of the Nazis? If so, he was not alone in his angry chauvinism. In fact, the Expressionists were magnets for condemnation from all quarters, left and right, German, French, American, English, Academics, Dadaists, and Abstractionists. Personally, it only made me love their work even more. To piss-off so many different artists, critics, intellectuals, and members of the public – they had to be doing something right.
Even the origin of the word’s use in art parlance is still hotly debated. Of course, all art is expressive in one way or another. Every artist aims to communicate to a public - and in the modern Western world – the general public have typically prized works of emotional power and vulnerability in their art and music. However, the art world has typically swung from an emotional approach to art and an intellectual one. For every Michelangelo there has been a Raphael, for every Caravaggio a Poussin, for every Rembrandt a Vermeer, for every Goya a David, for every Picasso a Marcel Duchamp, for every Pollock a Warhol, for every Bacon a Hockney, for every Julian Schnabel a David Salle, for every Jonathan Meese a Matthias Weischer.
Initially in the early 1900s, Expressionism was a catch-all word used to describe art that was the opposite of naturalistic Impressionism, an art that emphasized the artist’s emotions and highly subjective interpretation of reality, not his eyesight and perceptions of light.
Various writers in the nineteenth century had begun to use the term Expressionism in their journals. As the author Lionel Richard in The Concise Encyclopaedia of Expressionism (1984) and Marit Werenskiold in The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses (1984) detailed the origin of the word Expressionism is a tangled web, complicated by nationalism and professional rivalry.
Researchers like Armin Arnold dug up a mention of a modern school of expressionist painters in an article on the poet William Wordsworth in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in July 1850 by an anonymous writer. The article described: “the expressionist school of modern painters [who] rebuke the richness of the colourists by the conventional ideality of their Byzantine Madonnas.”
Arnold also found out that in 1880, in Manchester, Charles Howley devoted a lecture to modern painters in which he identified some as expressionists seeking to express their feelings and emotions. No mention of specific artists were made, however given the date 1850, it is likely that he was speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite’s, who were very far from what we would consider today as Expressionists.
Arnold also dug up a novel by Charles de Kay from the US called The Bohemian from 1878 – in which a group of writers who called themselves expressionists appeared. However, none of this usage defined Expressionism in sufficiently exact stylistic terms. Other historians of Expressionism like Fritz Schmalenbach rightly dismissed these discoveries as obscure and essentially meaningless.
Other historians like the Swede Teddy Brunius have found other obscure quotes. In 1891 in James McNeill Whistler’s book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies there was this quote from an unknown source: “Mr Whistler is eminently an ‘Impressionist’… We want not ‘impressionists’ but expressionists’, men who can say what they mean because they know what they have heard [Sic!]” However, this was just a play-on-words not a real critical use of the word.
In 1901 in Paris at the Salon des Independants, the minor and forgotten painter Jules-August-Herve exhibited eight canvases under the title Expressionismes. He was clearly making a nod towards Impressionism and at the same time opposing it. However, he made no impact on French art history other than perhaps preventing any serious French painters using the term again. In addition, his use of the plural suggested that he was merely describing a set of pictures and was not announcing a new movement. The term made no mark on the French art world and only entered French critical writing in 1920 when it was used to describe German Expressionists.
In Germany, in May 1910 Aby Warburg writing about late Middle Ages graphic art, in the Journal Kunst und Kunstler, used the term “expressionistisch’ in contrast to “impressionistch.” In retrospect, some said that in 1910 in Germany, when Paul Cassirer was asked if a painting by Pechstein was still an Impressionist canvas, he replied that it was an example of expressionism. A quip they say became widely used in artistic circles and later the newspapers.
Then in 1911 within the space of four months, the term Expressionism emerged in the writings of a number of writers first in England, then Norway, then Sweden and finally Berlin. It started with Arthur Clutton-Brock in England in January 1911. In The Burlington Magazine, he wrote: “Their only end is expression… And to distinguish them [the Post-Impressionists] from the Impressionists we might, perhaps, call them Expressionists, which is an ugly word, but less ugly than Post-Impressionists.” His argument was carried on by Henrik Sorensen in Norway in February, and by Carl David Moselius in Sweden in March 1911.
All of these writers used the term as a replacement for the unsatisfactory Post-Impressionist term (which no longer described much of the art in the first years of the twentieth century) – which had been coined by Roger Fry for his infamous exhibition Manet and The Post-Impressionists in the Grafton Galleries in London from November 1910 to January 1911. According to Werenskiold, Roger Fry between 1910-11 had toyed with the use of expressionism as a term to describe those artists in France between 1880-1910, like van Gogh, Gauguin and later Matisse who had developed increasingly personal imagery, subjective emotions, and idiosyncratic use of colour and brushwork in their paintings. However, Fry finally opted to call these artists ‘Post-Impressionists’. Marit Werenskiold’s theory was that Roger Fry who was a friend and mentor of Cutton-Brock and his editor on The Burlington Magazine, had prompted or encouraged Arthur Clutton-Brock to make this new distinction. She also thought that he had been influenced by the writings of Matisse in this, and she might have been right, but she was not alone in this. She also later suggested that Fry might have been the real author of the original article.
From April to September 1911, at the Berlin Sezession, one room of invited French painters including Georges Braque, André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Picasso, and Maurice de Vlaminck, were introduced in the catalogue as Expressionists. Yet, the person responsible for the catalogue remains unknown. Writing about the show in Der Sturm, Walter Hegmann wrote: “a group of Franco-Belgian painters have decided to call themselves expressionists.” It was from this point that the term became widely used in German newspapers and it became a recognized term.
In 1919, Henry Kahnweiler (the German dealer who promoted Picasso and the Cubists in France and Europe) in the journal Das Kunstblatt, attacked the idea spreading in Germany that Expressionism was of French origin. This was at a time, when many in Germany were attacking modernism, as a corrupting French hoax on the art-world. Kahnweiler denied that the term had any usage in France. His critique was aimed at Theodor Daubler who nearly went as far as claiming that Matisse was the originator of Expressionism and that the French critic Louis Vauxelles had originated the term.
This last claim as I have mentioned has merit. Matisse’s bold, ambitious and unnaturalistic use of colour as early as 1905 predated the less daring early work of the Brücke painters who were still trying to digest the lessons of van Gogh. In 1908, Matisse’s first important exhibition of paintings were shown in Berlin. The following year Kunst und Kunstler published his now legendary ‘Painters Notes’ (first published in December 1908 in Grande Revue) in which he famously wrote: “what I am looking for above all is a means of expression.” However while there were superficial similarities between the aims of the Fauves like Matisse and Van Dongen and the German Expressionists like Kirchner and Nolde, there was also major differences of taste, feeling and purpose.
What this convoluted and tangled tale tells me, is that there was never any inventor of the term Expressionism in any meaningful sense. The closest was probably Matisse, even though his work was very different from later German Expressionism. In fact, as an authentic Expressionist, I have to say I find such academic epistemology sickening, absurd and meaningless. Expressionism was a word bandied about by many people at the turn of the twentieth century (often as a term of abuse) or used so superficially as to be nothing but slang. That it became within a few decades synonymous with Modern Art in the mind of the German public, only confirms to me that it was a catchall word, emanating from a broad Zeitgeist. What is not in doubt is that it was in Germany that this word took hold, became a rallying-cry for young artists and a politicized subject for sceptics, academics, xenophobes and later the Fascists.
As I have mentioned, today in art writing, Expressionism is usually used to describe the art of the German Expressionists and particularly the two groups of artists that formed Die Brücke in Dresden and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. But Expressionism was never a unified movement. It was largely a dispersed group of loners living in isolation on the edge of society – like Munch in Oslo, Ensor in Ostend, Schiele in Vienna or Rouault in Paris. Moreover, it was German artists, writers, bohemians, art galleries, collectors and museums in the 1910s that first embraced these outsiders when others in Europe dismissed them as barbarians. Expressionism in Germany was not restricted to painting, drawing, sculpture and wood-cut printing, it also influenced poetry, prose, theatre, film, music and even architecture.
The Expressionist generation of 1905-23, were in direct conflict with Prussian patriarchy and their fathers in particular, this battle of wills was made most explicit in Expressionist drama and prose. This young generation of men, were sick of the hypocrisy in German society, and at the same time they feared that real social change could not be achieved. Suicides amongst young men reached epidemic proportions. “The petty-bourgeois conspiracy to hush up matters sexual, especially when they concerned the young, can be seen by the fact that Spring’s Awakening, though published in 1891, went unperformed until 1906. Nevertheless, the issue of schoolboy suicides had already become a national scandal. Indeed, “in the last twenty-years of the nineteenth century no fewer than 1, 152 adolescents thus took their own lives.”(Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press, P.27, 1987.)
The Expressionist revolution in Germany was looked on with suspicion by the rest of Europe. Remember anti-German feeling in France, Britain and America from 1914-1945 was at fever pitch. Everything German was looked upon with suspicion, fear and anger, even when its artists had often been persecuted in their own country and were politically blameless.
Even in Germany, the romance with Expressionism only lasted until the end of World War One. In its aftermath, new artists like those of the Dada movement attacked it as bourgeois, decadent and politically suspect. It was finally finished-off by the Nazis when they took power in 1933. After the Second World War and DeNazification, it was restored to pride of place in German museums, however as a creative movement it had lost all its edge. Perversely the persecution of the Expressionists by the Nazi’s resulted in their rehabilitation in the post war art world and today art works that were confiscated by the Nazi’s are the most sought after works by collectors.
It was only in the late 1960s, that the work of the German and Austrian Expressionists were rediscovered in Europe, by a young generation unbiased by experience of World War Two. For these youthful students, who were also fighting patriarchal, capitalistic and militaristic power, these young German’s spoke to them. Its massive resurgence as a commercially viable and critically respected movement in the late 1960s in Europe, Britain and America created a professorial gold rush, where all kinds of artists were roped into its pantheon, all kinds of critics tried to lay claim to its origin, and all kinds of nations tried to claim its homeland. Thus, Expressionism has always been the lump of faeces that turns into gold, back into faeces and then back into gold. It has constantly been derided by the academics when unfashionable, and parodied and copied by them when at its peak of consumption. The truly great Expressionists alone in their studios were the lie to the academic rule, that states one has to be trained, educated and socialized into making great art.
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As I have mentioned the public and critics in Paris, London and New York have always been suspicious of Expressionism. Even today, Expressionism is a byword for madness, intellectual crudeness, and art-world trouble-making. Exhibitions of Expressionist greats like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Max Beckman have never achieved the viewing figures or public popularity of artists like Monet, Matisse or Picasso. Artists like van Gogh, Munch and Bacon are rare examples of Expressionists - whose life and work was eventually lauded by the critics, prized by collectors, empathetically studied by the general public, and parodied in the media.
The autonomy and indifference of the Expressionist artist, simultaneously alienated the snobs of the art world and enraged the general public who thought them con men. Yet within two generations the very best of these artists, became heroes to those who dreamed of a similarly independent life, free from the restraints, compromises and drudgery of middle-class life.
Expressionist artists deliberately worked against the grain of social order. They prized their individuality and feelings above the learned-by-rote techniques and intellectualizations of academic art. “For the Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty in art was only born out of a refusal to be honest. The art of the classical masters, of a Raphael or Correggio, seemed to them insincere and hypocritical. They wanted to face the stark facts of our existence, and to express their compassion for the disinherited and the ugly. It became almost a point of honour with them to avoid anything which smelt of prettiness and polish, and to shock the ‘bourgeois’ out of his real or imagined complacency.” (E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, Pocket Edition 2006, London: Phaidon, P.437.)
In Expressionist art, the voice of the individual was raised against civilizing academic convention, social compromise, and press-speak. Expressionist painters sought to make their own psychological understanding of the world the central axis of their art. Rendering commonplace things in an unfamiliar manner, Expressionist painters highlighted the fissure between the personal and the social. As Donald Kuspit has written: “Expressionist emotional resistance to the social status quo can be traced back to Romanticism, as suggested above. The use of art as self-expression, the notion that art transmits emotion from one person to another, and the belief that the work of art is an expressive object because it embodies emotion – all these ideas are inseparable from the modern dialectic of self and society that emerged explicitly during Romanticism and endures to the present day. It envisions a self trying to hold its emotional own against a society that threatens to rob it of its individuality, desperately trying to survive in a society indifferent to its particular existence, struggling to remain inwardly vital and human in a society that exploits vitality and humanity for often inhuman collective purposes, such as war. It is a self that is critical of the society in which it finds itself – a society that it experiences as inhibiting, even stifling. It uses whatever tactics are necessary - they seem unconventional and antisocial from the viewpoint of conventional society – to vigorously express itself in the hope of loosening the grip of society on life and art. The modern theory of expression conceives it as the vector result of a dialectical tension between instinctive emotion and social repression.” (Donald Kuspit, The Inner Conflict of Expression, Expressive!, Foundation Beyeler, 2003, P. 13.)
North and Central Europe was the home of the first Expressionists. Early Expressionism of the 1900s, was the culmination of an attitude to making art that had started in the Renaissance when for the first time the reputation and personality of the artist was considered vital to its meaning, content and value. No artist signified this shift in artistic thinking more than the German master Albrecht Dürer, whose narcissism and melancholy imbued his stupendously skilled work, with a metaphysical world weariness that was groundbreaking. Indeed, the German and Flemish painters of the Northern Renaissance like Hans Baldung Grien, Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Matthias Grünewald, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, were to become rediscovered by the German Expressionists, who were trying to trace the roots of their temperament. However, even the Latin cultures of Italy and Spain could lay claim to proto-Expressionists, like the late religiously tortured Michelangelo with his obsessive piles of dammed human bodies, the Venetian painter Tintoretto with his Baroque and animated canvases, and El Greco with his spatially packed and energized compositions. Personally, I date the real start of modern Expressionism to Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings of 1821-3 (housed now in the Prado Museum in Madrid.) To me they are the first major paintings to express a modern conception of man’s Godless existence in a cruel, unjust, and absurd universe.
The three great upsurges in Expressionist art in the twentieth century, 1905, 1940 and 1980, came in periods of great social, political and economic uncertainty, and a broad fear of cultural decline.
There were many kinds of early Expressionism. First there was a pan-European, pre-Expressionism, a non-movement of isolated and highly individualistic Expressionists like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, James Ensor, and Georges Rouault, whose work tended towards the emotional, primitive, spiritual, irrational, and subjective.
Next in Germany there was pre-war figurative Expressionism centred around the Die Brücke group, whose early work was optimistic, idealistic, and often joyous.
They were followed by a semi-abstract form of painting evolved by the painters of Der Blaue Reiter and personified in the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, which was born from an Expressionist ethos that believed in the subjective, emotional, spiritual and idealistic power of art to change the world.
Later in Germany there was a post-war figurative Expressionism, which was cynical, despairing and increasingly neurotic.
At the same time in Austria there emerged another kind of figurative Expressionism - which was more animated, sexually fixated and anguished. This Austrian Expressionism consisted of a handful of highly individualistic artists like Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.
Meanwhile in France, there were Fauve artists’ like Matisse and Van Dongen who exhibited in Germany on numerous occasions before the First World War, and Jewish Expressionist artists’ like Mark Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine and Jules Pascin who lived and worked in Paris between the wars.
In South America, there was also an expressive art that mixed Western and Aztec influences with Socialist politics, to create the only credible socialist art of the twentieth century.
Added to these was the third great wave of Expressionism of the 1940s, which ranged from the abstract drips of Jackson Pollock to the aggressive abstract/figurative Expressionism of Willem de Kooning in America and the earthy brutish figuration of Dubuffet and the coiled nudes of Fautiner in Paris.
Finally in the late 1970s there was the emergence of a new Post-Modern, academic, mannered and commercialized form of Neo-Expressionism epitomized by the work of George Baselitz and Julian Schnabel whose work was heavily embedded within the new art gallery system. Thus trying to pin down Expressionism, is like trying to herd fifty cats in a canvas bag.
Expressionism was the total opposite of ‘art-for-arts-sake’. For the Expressionis, art was a compulsion, an obsession and literally a reason for living. The clichéd myth of the great Expressionist artist demanded that he must suffer for his art. Integrity was vital for the Expressionist artist, frequently it was all they had.
In the art world as in the real world, nothing sold better in the early days of modernism than a sob story. Thus, their life-stories were deemed vital to their credibility. Many of the great Expressionist artists were self-taught and unteachable, mentally unstable, anti-social and spiritually tortured. As Michel Ragon pointed out - no other movement not even Surrealism, was so closely linked with madness. While the Surrealists played and flirted with insanity, many of the greatest Expressionists were stark raving mad. Their biographies were a litany of childhood bereavement, neurosis, rejection, alcoholism, drug abuse, syphilis, poverty, isolation, public ridicule, depression, mental hospitals, attempted suicides and realized suicides.
Even if success did come, it usually resulted in a complete loss of the scared fire of their youth, and accusations of selling out. It also inflicted a fatal form of self-censorship, brought on by over-exposure. While those precious few that made a mark on art history were burdened with a mythology, hyperbole and fetishization, that made even them deeply uncomfortable. Madman or genius, worthless or priceless, fool or prophet, these were the only career options for the Expressionist. In keeping with their art, there were no grey areas. The tragedy of some of the Expressionist artists was that their burning desire to speak openly to everyone often resulted in nothing but rejection, marginalization and even deeper incomprehension.
From the earliest days of Post-Impressionism, Symbolism and later Expressionism - modern artists, were connected by many European writers with insanity, in both positive and negative terms. It began in 1863 with Cesare Lombroso’s ‘Genius and Insanity’, and his example was taken up by other studies in pathology by; Charcot, Krafft-Ebing, Magnan and continued in more nasty and frantic terms with Max Nordau’s Degeneration in 1895.
The Jewish medical doctor Nordau railed against the decadence and vulgarity of high art and mass-produced pornography. He took aim at many of the modern artistic movements of his time including the Pre-Raphaelites, Realists and Symbolists as well as writers like Zola, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Ibsen and composers like Wagner. “From a clinical point of view somewhat unlike each other, these pathological images are nevertheless only different manifestations of a single and unique fundamental condition, to wit, exhaustion, and they must be ranked by the alienist in the genius melancholia, which is the psychiatrical symptom of an exhausted central nervous system… We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides, ‘What is to come next?’” (Quoted by Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press, P. 10, 1987.)
This concern with the vulgarity of contemporary art and the new mass-produced pornography that was sold covertly everywhere in Europe, was perfectly summed up in the writings of Swiss hygienist Dr. August Forel. In his book ‘Art and Pornography’ in 1905, Dr Forel expressed similar concerns about the degeneracy of western civilization: “There are a few great artists, but thousands of charlatans and plagiarists. Many of those who have never had the least idea of the dignity of art pander to the lower instincts of the masses and not to their best sentiments. In this connection, erotic subjects play a sad and powerful part. Nothing is too filthy to be used to stimulate the base sensuality of the public… In these brothels of art, the most obscene vice is glorified, even the pathological.” (Quoted by Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press, P.11, 1987.)
By 1912, artists like Paul Klee had begun to praise the art of the insane, and by the 1920s books contrasting the work of modern artists and those in mental patients emerged. Hans Prinzhorn, in his groundbreaking work ‘Artistry of the Mentally Ill’, (1922), observed that: “The particularly close relationship of a larger number of our [schizophrenics] pictures to contemporary art is obvious.” However he countered the view that self-victimizing Expressionist artists were the same as the truly victimized mentally ill marginalized by society and incarcerated in hospitals: “The conclusion that a painter is mentally ill because he paints like a given mental patient is no more intelligent or convincing than [the idea] that Pechstein and Heckel are Africans from the Cameroons because they produce wooden figurines like those by Africans from the Cameroons”.
The truly great Expressionist artists did not choose art, it possessed them like a fever. They emerged in a period of political, social, sexual, and religious crisis, the likes of which the world had never seen. Remember this was an age in Europe when many said that religious faith was moribund, God was dead, monarchy was considered by many to be decadent and corrupt, democracies were still in infancy and ideological battles about politics, religion, sexuality, female emancipation and the purpose of art was debated furiously in cafes throughout the West. Everyone could see that the growing arms race, and diplomatic hostilities amongst the great powers would lead to war. However, no one could imagine how devastating it would be when it arrived. In such uncertain and crazy times these artists fell back on the one thing they could trust their own gut. They envisioned art as a new form of religion, a brotherhood, a protest against society, a soothing balm for the desperately lonely and a utopian solution to modern life.
For the early Expressionist artists, personal, urgent communication was paramount. Their restless, agitated, linear and violently coloured work, expressed their metaphysical anxiety forcefully. The German Expressionist’s were never great innovators in terms of form. Their work was the summation and exploitation of a series of very different movements and influences; Impressionism, Symbolism, Jugendstil, Fauvism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Gothic art, German Romanticism, African and Oceanic art, Folk art, naïve art and even Islamic and Oriental art. Which they both pumped up and debased, in order to create some of the most violent looking and aggressive art-works in human history. Perhaps only the Incas produced more blood-curdling works. However, that was their intention. They wanted to provoke reaction, which they hoped would expose the metal fist under the velvet glove of Western society. Remember the wealth and power of a small European elite and the growing prosperity of the middle-classes was based on Imperialistic military might, which had colonized; Africa, Asia and South America, and held down a teaming underclass in their own cities and countryside.
They hated the ultra-disciplined, highly-skilled, but unimaginative and conformist academic artists of their day, who sought to; beautify life, glorify the elite and flatter their patrons. They wanted to shake everything up, critique their society and defiantly set themselves above the dim-witted but cunning patrician class. They expressed abnormal sensibilities, uncontrollable emotions, primitive narratives and an increasingly doomed worldview. All of this was part of the increasing democratizing of art, and the new assertion of individual freedom in society.
They distorted and accentuated reality - in order to express their feelings for the world. They used violent, garish, jarring colours, often taken straight from the tube. Which they piled on with thick hog-hair brushes, amassing think trenches of impastoed paint, a tendency that reached its convulsive peak in the canvases of Soutine. They used explosive lines, drawn with haste and a heavy hand and sharp contrasts of light and shade. The subjects of their paintings were dramatic and animated – landscapes on fire with colour, seedy nocturnal street scenes, sordid brothel scenes, vulgar nudes, aggressive self-portraits, and even deeply religious or spiritual paintings.
They sought to do more than simply record the naturalistic appearance of everyday life – they sought to express a transcendent truth, often verging on the abstract, especially in the work of Der Blaue Reiter. Despite their uncertain faith, they were often deeply spiritual men, just look at van Gogh, Rouault, Nolde, or later expressive painters like Jackson Pollock, or Mark Rothko.
Many of their works verged on the unintentionally comic, a result of their very basic skill sets and lack of self-criticism. Many of their drawings were no better than that of talentless teenagers. However, the forcefulness of their expressive urges and their authentic (if naïve) sincerity raised the stakes in many of their works. They often saw themselves as Christ like figures, reviled, misunderstood and debased by the ignorant masses and cunning elites. They imagined their art as a transcendent expression of their self-hood, unmediated by social or aesthetic constraints and dogma. This was essentially a revitalization of the Romantic artists’ belief in the primacy of their own egos and spiritual quest. It was a mythology that was to be reborn in the art of the early American Abstract-Expressionist painters in the 1940s, even though they had little understanding of its German origins. The fundamental problem with this fetishization of the artist’s ‘vision’ – was that it was both presumptuous and elitist in an increasingly egalitarian society. Moreover, for every thousand artists at the turn of the century who believed they had some kind of privileged, ‘God-given’ power of expression, only a handful were equipped with the required level of skill, originality, dedication and relentless self-questioning required to make timeless and universal art.
The city as painted by the early German Expressionists took on an at first frightening and finally hellish quality unseen in art since Goya. Modern urban life in their eyes was electrifying, terrifying, hypocritical, and debased. They both loved its freedom and hated its decadence. In Kirchner’s paintings of Berlin in the early 1910s, electric lights shone on the creepy lives of men trawling the streets at night, for prostitutes who stood like coked-up, Gothic movie stars, on the lonely sidewalks. After World War 1, savage satirists like Grosz and Dix, depicted a chaotic Berlin teeming with handicapped and scared soldiers begging for money, axe murders dripping in blood, vengeful Generals, gross fat bankers fondling heartless whores, and men shooting or hanging themselves in their cold attics. Of course, there had been men who had survived the war intact in both mind and body, of course murder was rare, of course there were honourable Generals and bankers, of course there were sweet-natured and chaste women in Germany, of course suicide remained an exception. However, artists like Grosz and Dix were not concerned with reasoned discourse, the times demanded an art of protest and accusation. It may have been an art based on an ‘inner-image’ that distorted reality, but it was done with a moral purpose. Their art became a ticker-tape from the front lines of existence.
Expressionist artists like Vincent van Gogh, James Ensor, Edvard Munch, Ferdinand Hodler, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde were typically egotistical, often technically mediocre in the traditional academic sense, and emotionally unstable. Many only worked in an Expressionist manner for a short time in their twenties and early thirties. Some like Paula Modersohn-Becker and Richard Gerstl died long before it had become a recognized movement. Some grew and developed into fully rounded masters like Max Beckman. While others like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner grew tired of the fight and their work became more decorative and conciliatory. Many like Edvard Munch and James Ensor outlived their creativity, and merely rehashed their past achievement’s. But the raw honesty of their art shone brightly in a world of fake polite paintings for fake polite people.
Many of them were sexist pigs, and their portrayal of women in their art was often cruel and misogynistic. No other artistic movement has portrayed women so savagely. Women in Expressionist paintings were typically femme fatales, fierce dominatrix’s, demonic Venuses, cunning prostitutes and overwhelming earth mothers from hell – just look at Munch, Kirchner, Grosz, Dix or later Dubuffet and de Kooning. These were old-fashioned men who often divided women into Madonna’s and whores - wives’ and prostitutes’. However at other times there was a heartbreaking tenderness to Expressionist depictions of women - just look at Kokoschka’s painting of Alma Mahler, Schiele’s paintings of his wife Edith, or Max Beckman’s paintings of his wife Quappi – and tell me these men did not have a heart.
Moreover, if you compared their depictions of themselves and other men, you would be hard pressed to say that they did not hate themselves just as much. No one for example has ever painted fat, ugly, greedy, vicious men with such condemnation as George Grosz.
The great masters of Expressive art were in my view; Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Thèodore Géricault, Honoré Daumier, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, van Gogh, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, James Ensor, Lovis Corinth, Kees van Dongen, Paula Mondersohn-Becker, Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Alexei von Jawlensky, Paula, Georges Rouault, Amadeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Chaïm Soutine, Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Asger Jorn, Jean Atlan, Francis Gruber, Jean Fautrier, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, George Baselitz, John Bellany, Anselm Kiefer, Frank Aurebach, Leon Kossoff, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck Connelly and Hughie O’Donoghue. These were my heroes. In their work I found a depth of feeling and perception utterly lacking in other modern art. Their styles varied enormously but what they all had in common was genuine soul.
The tradition of Expressionist painting was also one of the few strong threads that ran through Modern Irish art. For example, Jack B. Yeats in the 1930s painted in a style similar to Chaïm Soutine, his contemporary who was working in France. Later, Neo-Expressionist Irish painters like Brian Bourke, Paul Kane, Charles Cullen, Michael Cullen, Patrick Hall, Timothy Hawkesworth, Brian Maguire, and Patrick Graham all went through Expressionist phases.
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It is easy to write about Impressionism, Cubism, and the School of Paris without ever mentioning the socio-political background to their art. One can waffle on and on about high-flown aesthetic problems and art world bitching, without ever talking about the Dreyfus Affair, The Great War or European politics. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why French art has proved hugely popular as a grand distraction from life’s intractable problems. The same cannot be said of the German Expressionists.
The fin-de-siècle world of nineteenth century Europe, was one of unprecedented technological, social, and political change. It was a time of optimism and despair. In France in 1848 and 1871 two revolutionary movements had failed, and by the end of the century, intellectuals in Europe increasingly expressed pessimistic fears for society and politics. Many thought that the western world had become decadent and would eventually succumb to the stronger races they currently colonized. Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and the survival of the fittest became a fearful talking-point amongst intellectuals and a manifesto of survival for middle-class capitalists and elitist Empire builders. Throughout Europe, nationalism, class-warfare, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and racism reared their ugly heads as the power and certainty of the old elites were challenged by; a growing arms race, an unregulated financial system, the rise of Feminism, and a fear of the ‘other’. Yet apart from a few honourable men and women like Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet and Honoré Daumier in France and Käthe Kollwitz in Germany, only a handful of major artists of the day reflected this social upheaval, decadence, corruptness, and social unjustness’ in their art.
In literature, writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Søren Kierkegaard all expressed this new age of subjective, religious, sexual, urban living, and moral anxiety. However, it was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who became their prophet and guiding light out of a corrupted world of moral hypocrisy.
In his Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky contrasted the materialistic ethos, of the late nineteenth century (that had culminated for him in England’s building of The Crystal Palace in 1851), against many people’s increasing search for an authentic and unbroken faith in God and pursuit of a spiritual life. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s passionate, intellectual, spiritual, and even revolutionary writings exposed the unjustness and decadency of modern life. Often as in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, he did this by bringing his readers into the minds of marginalized, poverty stricken and half-mad men who still strove to find the light in lives of darkness. “I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too… As far as my own personal opinion is concerned, to care only for prosperity seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the “Crystal Palace” it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a “crystal palace”, if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I am sure man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why after all, suffering, is the sole origin of consciousness… [And] consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to two times two makes four.” (Notes from Underground, 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky.) This search for authentic expression was to become a key concern for the German generation of 1905.
The German character was a complex one, but it was known for its intellectualism, love of the arts and philosophy, as well as its great skill at war. Goethe spoke of this to Eckermann: “The Germans really are a strange lot, they make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves by looking for deep thoughts and ideas everywhere and putting them into everything. Just have the courage to give yourself up to the first impressions… don’t think all the time that everything must be pointless if it lacks an abstract thought or idea.” (Quoted by Norbert Lynton, Concepts of Modern Art, Ed. Nikos Stangos, Chapter Three, Expressionism, Revised Edition, P.35, 1981.)
Germany for good or ill was the centre of world events from the 1900s-1945. Germany was a federal state in the 1900s. Although Berlin was the political and artistic capital, other regional cities like; Munich, Cologne, Dresden, and Hanover all had their own local governments, art schools, galleries and museums, vying for prestige. It was an age of xenophobia and chauvinism. In France right wing parties attacked Modern Art as a German or Jewish conspiracy. In Germany, it was attacked by similar parties, as a French, Bolshevik, or Jewish conspiracy.
The battle for the heart and soul of Germany was bitterly fought between the conservative and the Liberal, the socialist and the Fascist, the avant-garde and the academic. This social, intellectual, and finally violent confrontation of ideas was anticipated and visualized by the German Expressionists and Neue Sachlichkeit artists.
Germany from the late eighteenth century untill the end of the nineteeth century had been enthralled by the achievements of the ancient Greeks. Museums heaved with masterpieces discovered in Greece, Turkey and the Middle East, the greatest of which was the famous Pergamon Alter discovered in Turkey and transported to Berlin. German architecture of the day was born from grand Greek moulds, German philosophers debated Socrates and Plato ad nausum, and countless German painters like the Nazerines made trips to Greece and Italy, in order to educate and refine their provinical taste. The Prussian historian, archaeologist and antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), who some consider the “father of art history”, led, defined and defended this love of Hellenistic culture in his voloumous writings - which had a massive influence on academic Classical theories for nearly two hundred years. Yet, for the generation of 1905, this obsession with classical order, reason, grace and power - was oppressive and cliched. In an early book on tribal art which Emil Nolde hoped to later publish, he began with these two key points which summed up the attitude of many young artists in Germany:
1. “’We see the highest art in the Greeks. In painting, Raphael is the greatest of all masters.’ This was what every art pedagogue taught twenty or thirty years ago.
2. Some things have changed since then. We don’t like Raphael and the sculptures of the so-called flowering of Greek art leaves us cold. Our predecessors’ ideals are no longer ours. We like less the works under which great names have stood for centuries. Sophisticated artists in the hustle and bustle of their times made art for Popes and palaces. We value and love the unassuming people who worked in their workshops, of whom we barely know anything today, for their simple and largely-hewn sculptures in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg, Bamberg.” (Quoted from Expressionism by Ashley Bassie, Kent: Grange Books, P.28, 2005.)
Seeking a new and authentic Germanic artistic voice, many in Germany rediscovered the art of the middle-ages and the German Gothic. In 1912 Wilhelm Worringer a young history student wrote for his doctorate an influential text called Formprobleme der Gothic (Form in Gothic.) In this thesis he studied the illuminated manuscripts and sculptures, the ivories and glass paintings of the Eleventh to thirteenth centuries and the oil paintings of the Middle-Ages, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century.
Worringer contrasted the naturalistic and sensual art of Classicism with the more alienated, linear, abstract-tending, transcendental art of the Northern Gothic artist. It had a profound influence on German and Northern artists who recognized the difference of their world-view from that of the joi de vivre of Mediterranean cultures. His text articulated the complex nature of “the transcendentalism of the Gothic world of expression.” Which he said required that, “uncanny pathos which attaches itself to the animation of the inorganic.” While in the warm and comforting south, man felt at ease and in communion with arcadia, in the colder and more inhospitable north, he felt estranged and troubled by nature. Which gave northern art its restless, anxious and abstracted character. “The need in Northern man for activity, which is precluded from being translated into a clear knowledge of actuality and which is intensified for lack of this natural solution, finally disburdens itself in an unhealthy play of fantasy. Actuality, which the Gothic man could not transform into naturalness by means of clear-sighted knowledge, was overpowered by this intensified play of fantasy and transformed into a spectrally heightened and distorted actuality. Everything becomes weird and fantastic. Behind the visible appearance of a thing lurks its caricature, behind the lifelessness of a thing an uncanny, ghostly life, and so all actual things become grotesque… common to all is an urge to activity, which, being bound to no one object, loses itself as a result in infinity”.
The reason this text was so timely and important, was because it not only perfectly described the creepy, anxious, transcendentalism of Gothic artists like Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, it also gave a defining shape to the still perplexing art of contemporaries of Wilhelm Worringer like Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Ferdinand Hodler, James Ensor, Emil Nolde and even Wassily Kandinsky, in which one could find this self-same Gothic restless energy, near abstraction of reality and alienated intensification of feeling.
Another great influence came from Norway, when in 1892, Edvard Munch’s work was shown in Berlin it caused public hysteria, scandal, and rabid press indignation, which lead to the show being closed after just one week. However, it also fired the imagination of a whole generation of young painters and writers in Germany who recognized his genius.
The final great visual influence on German Expressionism was not European in origin, it was the vivid and powerful tribal art of Africa. They recognized its beauty and pathos and saw that it offered a completely different alternative to the fossilized art of the academies and salons.
As the historian Donald E. Gordon pointed out the Expressionist generation of 1905, were Left-Wing Nietzscheians, Post-Victorians, and Post-Impressionists. They were highly contradictory characters at once playing the part of rebels and social critics, decadents, and prophets of doom.
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In 1905, two young architecture students in Dresden called Erik Heckel (1883-) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) with their friends Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884) and Fritz Bleyl founded Die Brücke (The Bridge) - the first major group of painters to follow an Expressionist agenda. All these artists were men on a mission.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff coined the name. The exact reason for his choice is unclear, perhaps it was a nod to the many bridges of Dresden, often called the “Venice of the North.” Perhaps it was also an attempt to make an explicit connection with Nietzsche. “I love him whose soul is deep even in its ability to be wounded, and whom even a little thing can destroy: thus he is glad to go over the bridge.” (Fredrick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.) Their philosophy was embodied in Nietzsche’s ‘overman’ and his view of culture as a battle between the Apollonian (Classical order and reason) and Dionysian (Pantheistic and Baroque emotion.) Of course, they believed in the later.
They were all very young men in their early twenties. They had virtually no training in painting or drawing, and this self-taught ethos would inform (and at times undermine) the nature of their work. They saw art as a brotherhood, worshiped nature, espoused and lived free-love, and wanted to reach the masses with their work. They befriended underage teenage models, circus people, music-hall performers, gypsies, and prostitutes, their friendships based on similar free-thinking, free-living and marginalized poverty. They sought to free their minds and adopt an almost automatic form of painting.
A few other major artists joined this group for varying degrees of time, they included; Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Müller. Pechstein was technically the odd-one-out having had a sound grounding in academic skills, so it is not surprising that he was the first to really make money from his prettier, and easier to read art, and even be hailed as one of the greatest in Europe. However since then his work has slipped down the greasy-pole of critical thinking, largely because for an Expressionist painter he was too slick.
Die Brücke as a group lasted eight years. A reasonably long time given the short life-span of most modernist movements. However, once the thrill of brotherhood, was overtaken by selfish concerns for; personal glory, fame, and money, it bitterly fell apart.
The artists of Die Brücke shared studios, materials, life-models, and printing presses. They published manifestos together, staged group shows and promoted themselves as a young energetic group, trying to take on and reform the world. In many ways they were naturists and hippies before their time. It was a form of “cultivated rebellion” by largely middleclass young men.
They were sick of the received wisdom of the academic ethos, its slick techniques, classical ideology and almost total lack of imagination or genuine emotion. Although their techniques were radically different from that of realist painters, they shared their concern with down-to-earth subjects of everyday life.
The painters of Die Brücke used non-descriptive colouring and crude forceful drawing. They loathed abstraction, which was to over-take them as an influence on Modern Art, yet it had been born from their lair. All these artists aspired to a direct, unfiltered, non-conformist form of painting, that they hoped would communicate directly with the viewer. Thus, they shaped their working methods accordingly. They prized quick free-hand drawing and painting styles, which they hoped would capture the movement, speed and anxieties of modern life. They wanted to paint manly pictures, seemingly dashed off in a day, full of youthful vigour and aesthetic confrontation. They used deliberately clashing colours, rapid and thick brushstrokes, distortions of space and architecture and intense, overall compositional schemes.
Their wood-cut prints were ideal for self-promotion. The simple, effective, and very strong look of these black and white prints worked perfectly with Expressionist grammar. Woodcuts had first been used widely in the Gothic period and reached its technical and unsurpassed zenith with Albrecht Dürer. However, it had fallen out of favour with the advent of more advanced printing methods like engraving, etching and lithography. They deliberately used crude and quick methods of carving which would be big on impact, though limited in skill.
Watercolour was also an ideal medium for their spontaneous working methods, and they produced some of the liveliest and most original works in this medium of the century. Given their poverty, it also proved a cheap alternative to oil painting. Most of the iconic masterpieces of painting in the early twentieth century were in oil on canvas, but Georges Rouault, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Paul Klee in particular, were dynamic and daring masters of watercolour.
To my mind, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde were the greatest of artists of Die Brücke. Though in retrospect I now find them both highly suspect men. Although Nolde had joined the group in 1906, he remained essentially a loner. Nolde was a more daring colourist, and perhaps a profounder painter than Kirchner. However, Kirchner’s scope was larger both in terms of subject, content, and mediums. He was a stunningly handsome man, who painted many self-portraits throughout his career, usually looking haggard and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He produced oil and distemper paintings on canvas, board and paper, watercolours, wood-cut prints, sculptures and even some tapestries. He used his paint straight from the tube or mixed with petrol (to make it dry faster) and used colour combinations as daring and personal to him as Matisse’s were to him. The foundation of all this work, was over 20,000 surviving drawings in pencil, ink, and crayon. They were hasty sketches, made as he moved through the city, or quick figure studies of friends and models. He developed a rapid almost calligraphic style of drawing, which he called ‘hieroglyphs’, a kind of simplified visual coda. His subjects included landscapes, portraits, nudes, circus, and music hall scenes. The free art of Die Brücke also involved free-love, nudism, and most controversially the use of underage female nude models. This according to recent scholars, resulted in the possible seduction of Lina Franziska Fehrmann known as Fränzi or Marzella. Fränzi was born in October 1900, and she was from a poor working-class family. Fränzi started posing for Kirchner aged nine in late 1909 or early 1910. It is speculated by some scholars that both Kirchner and Heckel may have had sex with Fränzi when she was still under the age of eleven. To add to the confusion, Max Pechstein falsely remembered that two sisters aged twelve and fifteen from a variety family had, with the mother’s approval, agreed to pose for the artists of Die Brücke. This deceitful story was constantly repeated in Brücke literature during the twentieth century. However, at the time people naively believed that the artists of Die Brücke like their contemporary Egon Schiele were artists whose only concern with drawing young girls naked was innocently artistic. Only in the early twentieth-first century, did a growing awareness of child sexual abuse, and the many ways abusers manipulate their victims, force more critical eyes to look again at Kirchner’s relationship with Fränzi.
Kirchner was a very driven and ambitious artist who pushed himself to a nervous breakdown. Strangely, he also wrote on many occasions about his own work, trying to secure his place in history, but under the pseudonym of a French doctor called Louis de Marsalle! In later years, Kirchner even antedated his early work to secure an even greater place for himself in the Modern art race. This was because Modernism had put such a premium on originality and the creation of the first works of an important style or development of style, that even changing the date of a canvas backwards by less than a year could make an artist seem far more historically important. Added to this was the competition between French Fauves and German Expressionist that drove Kirchner to make it seem like his early expressive style had developed before Matisse’s early Fauvism. So, all in all, Kircher was free with his art, sex, and the truth. Moreover, in recent years the cultural appropriation of African and Oceanic art by Kirchner which was made possible by German colonialism has also come in for criticism.
When I was a young boy, I would enjoy looking at Nolde’s medium sized canvas ‘Two Women in A Garden’ 1915, in our National Gallery in Dublin. Even then, I wondered at its oddity in the Irish National Gallery collection, where it stuck out like a sore thumb, amidst the largely seductive French Modern Art collection. Only the Chaïm Soutine hung beside it shared its spirit. It was not a great Nolde, I thought it rather over-worked and it lacked the intensity and enflamed colour of his greatest work, however it was one of the few great emotive works I could identify with in an Irish collection.
The intensity of Nolde’s creativity was evident in all his work, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. Unlike the other Brücke painters, whose canvases were constructed through the dynamic use of lin, Nolde was a painterly painter. So much so, that his treatment of form was often crude and ignorant. However, his gestural filling in of space, gave his paintings an intensity and crude brutality, others like Max Pechstein could only dream of achieving. He was also one of the most aggressive and daring colourist of the Twentieth Century.
As he grew older, Nolde’s work became more spiritual and religious in motivation. He wanted to breathe new life into the stories of the Bible, yet his crude technique and sour and sweet plastered colours, made many believe that he was sacrilegious. Nolde felt a strong identification with van Gogh and like many in Europe, he read his letters avidly. This quote from van Gogh’s letters perfectly expressed the creative longing of artists like Nolde who followed this lonely path: “I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create…I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to confer by the actual radiance and vibration of our colourings.” (Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo, Arles, early September 1888, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Ed. Mark Roskill. London: Flamingo, P. 286, 1983.) Both artists shared a burning desire to make a ‘dead God’ - come back to life through the power of art.
Emil Nolde was not the only German Expressionist painter, swayed by German nationalism before World War 1. However, he was one of the few Modern painters to be seduced by anti-Semitism and the Nazi party. (Sadly, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner also expressed anti-Semitic views and admiration for the Nazis before his art was removed by them from German museums.) I love Nolde’s paintings, but this still sticks in my throat. He was a rural man, and they are often the most anti-intellectual, reactionary, and right-wing types, regardless of the nation or era involved. Nolde the artist was a radical, Nolde the political man was naïve at best. Debates about the moral responsibility of artists - have raged throughout time. Personally, I can still greatly admire and even love Nolde’s paintings even if I despise his politics and his type, which are reborn every year in different guises. Despite his early passionate support of the Nazi party, they did not return the compliment. In 1937, Nolde was represented, by the largest group of paintings in the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerated Art) exhibition. He was banned from painting and his materials were taken from him. Yet he managed to paint over 1,300 small watercolours during this period in secret. He called them the ungemalte bilder (‘unpainted pictures’.) Today, Nolde is considered one of the greatest watercolourists in art history.
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By 1913, conservative critics in Germany were attacking Expressionism as the crude daubs of lunatics, desperate to be noticed. In an age of growing militarism, artists were a nuisance, to say the least. The German public too, were suspicious of the ugliness and tendency towards caricature in Expressionism.
As E. H. Gombrich has pointed out in defence of the tendency of caricature in Expressionism: “Caricature had always been ‘expressionist’, for the caricaturist plays with the likeness of his victim, and distorts it to express just what he feels about his fellow man. As long as these distortions of nature sailed under the flag of humour nobody seemed to find them difficult to understand. Humorous art was a field in which everything was permitted, because people did not approach it with the prejudices they reserved for Art with a capital A. But the idea of a serious caricature, of an art which deliberately changed the appearance of things not to express a sense of superiority, but maybe love, or admiration, or fear, proved indeed a stumbling block... Yet there is nothing inconsistent about it. It is the sober truth that our feelings about things do colour the way in which we see them and, even more, the forms which we remember. Everyone must have experienced how different the same place may look when we are happy and when we are sad.” (E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, Pocket Edition 2006, London: Phaidon, P.436.)
On the eve of the First World War and during its height another great German Expressionist emerged, the Jewish painter, draughtsman, printmaker, poet and writer Ludwig Meidner. He is the forgotten man of German Expressionism because he never associated with the other major groups. He preferred the company of writers and poets, yet he was an archetypal Expressionist, a lonely, isolated man with a burning desire to express his feelings and fears as immediately as possible. His work was a strange self-taught mix of Rembrandt and van Gogh gone mad with the colours and dynamics of Delaunay. His major subjects were portraits and cityscapes - which he called ‘Apocalyptic Landscapes’. Sometimes he combined the two in a terrifying edge-of-the-volcano manner. In his cityscapes, Meidner projected his fears and realities, renting buildings apart with bombs, explosions, and earthquakes. They had the feel of apparitions of a mad prophet in the wilderness of the city.
His portraits and self-portraits were ugly in the extreme, however they hook you instantly with their humble and heartbroken honesty. Meidner, made-no-attempt to flatter, either his sitters or himself. In 1912, he formed a group of painters under the name Die Pathetiker (the solemn ones) but it proved short-lived. Conforming to the general rule of Expressionism, Meidner put so much into his early paintings, that he burned himself out quickly. The peak of his art was from 1911-1916, after which he concentrated on more religious paintings expressing his Jewish heritage.
He was also a prolific and talented writer of Expressionist inspired prose and dynamic directional drawings. He loved the art of drawing and wrote about it very powerfully as this excerpt testifies: “We have loved drawing from way back, we stupid, playful, laughing humans. From the first charming stammerings of primitive people to Kokoschka and Hermann Huber; from Raphael’s disciplined style to the pornographic doodles on our piss-house walls. Drawing makes you happy, healthy and a believer. I’m always alone. No girl loves me. No woman wants to sleep with me. No friend wants to be with me. I have no home, no country, am poor, outlawed and much hated... but I can draw, freely swing here and there... and I rejoice with the pencil, sing, pray and praise the Great Almighty.” (Quoted from Expressionist Portraits, Frank Whitford, London: Thames and Hudson, P.92, 1987.)
World War One finished of Expressionism as a revolutionary movement. The optimism of the pre-war years, had been replaced with shellshock, social and political disillusion, and savage cynicism.
After The Great War, commercialized Expressionism in Germany became a bandwagon – jumped on by opportunists. Because it was the only country to foster Expressionist art, it was also the only country where its mannerisms became imitated for profit. With the result, that much of late German Expressionism, was tainted by the fraudulent canvases of opportunists and charlatans of neither talent, vision nor authenticity. Even the credible artists of the early years, began mass-producing their work to feed an insatiable market. Thus, many who had supported the first flowerings of Expressionism, became disenchanted by its growing fakeness.
After the disaster of the First World War, Neue Sachlichkeit (in English New Objectivity) artists in Germany like George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckman produced work deeply influenced by the visual intensities of Expressionism, however it was given a more realistic, bitter, technically skilled, and socially conscious shape. Colour was more controlled and full of pathos and their line was more biting. All these artists, in reaction to the idealism of the early Expressionists, chose to play the part of social-agitators and critics. Gone were the utopian notions of sexual equality, brotherhood, and freedom, and in their place were powerless feelings of cynicism, condemnation, disenchantment, and disgust.
German Expressionism was finished off in 1933, with the Election of Hitler. Many artists fled the country, those that stayed found their teaching jobs axed, their work taken off the walls of the museums, their studios ransacked, their materials taken from them, and in 1937, their work held up as depraved and insane in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition. Worse was to come as historian Ashley Bassie in her book on Expressionism noted: “On 20th March 1939, around 5,000 paintings, prints and drawings, most of which were by Expressionist artists, were burned having been determined as “unverwertbarer Bestand” (property of no value.)” (Bassie, Ashley Expressionism. Kent: Grange Books, P. 172, 2005.)
After the Second world War, attempts where strenuously made in Germany to recover Germanys cultural heritage and redress these outrageous acts against human creativity. Those artists like Karl Hofer, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, and Otto Dix, who were still alive, were showered with honours, retrospectives, and academy teaching posts. Yet the question remains, if the Nazis had not hated and persecuted the Expressionists so much, would they have been later championed so much by the art world? And does the fear of sounding like Hitler ranting about ‘degenerate art’ prevent many in the art world, and members of the public, from expressing their real feelings about Expressionist art?