A View From the Edge
Expressionism- The View from the Edge
In the 19th century Romantic painting was focused on nature and the spirit.
These themes became intensified in the 20th century and were left to modernism to resolve in Expressionism.
Vincent Van Gogh was driven by self-expression. He was irritable and impatient, he wrote more than 750 letters to his brother Theo.
He was obsessed with the need to explain his mind and thoughts, to reveal the passions and to make his most intimate feelings known.
Van Gogh was a failed monk; he was maddened by inequality and social wrongdoing.
Sunflowers remain one of the most popular still life in the history of art, his answer to the Mona Lisa.
Van Gogh moved to the south for the light, he would fill his paintings with intense color that could reveal his anguish. His talent was indistinguishable from his mental state.
For a year (1889-90) Van Gogh was under treatment in a mental institution. After a raging quarrel with his friend Gaughin, he cut off his ear lobe and presented it to a prostitute.
We think he suffered from manic depression, but in reality he could see very clearly and record the world around him. He had fits of despair and hallucinations and moments of extreme visionary ecstasy.
In Starry Night, there are currents of energy..the sky is translated into thick paint using brush strokes that swirl with motion. He was influenced by Japanese prints. He painted nature with turbulent vigor, making trees more alive than ever before. He made many of his paintings when he was in the asylum and they still exist there today. The motifs in his paintings (trees, flowers, the natural forms) became symbols. Nature to Van Gogh was both exquisite and terrible. He was not merely a madman but an ecstatic that was a great formal painter.
Van Gogh was 37 when he shot himself. He changed modern art with his use of color and his expression of pleasure and terror in nature.
Edvard Munch was the first modern painter to make work that addressed the idea that personality was created by conflict. Freud and Munch shared the great insight that self is the battleground, where desire and social constraint meet. His paintings were high-drama, full of emotion and suffering, the characters were icons or symbols and not just people.
Munch was pessimistic, his childhood was ghastly: his father was a religious bigot and his mother was a submissive wreck, his sister died of TB “Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle”
The main image of his life was the sickroom. The painting of his family gathered after the death of his sister, the mask like faces, the averted heads the twisting hands of the women contribute to the feeling of isolation.
Munch’s relationship to women was strange; they were either vampires or cruel fertility idols or mothers. Sexual awakening is ominous and hateful as seen in Puberty.
She is covering herself in an awkward gesture with the shadow lurking behind her.
Women were either virgin or femme fetale, bringer of anguish and emotional ruin.
Munch embodied the nature of Expressionism before it was named!
His inspiration for the Scream, the most famous image of neurosis, was the Inca mummy, a symbol for fright and the desire for security. The main figure is a ghost with a hollow mouth. The painting is swirling forced perspective and untamed sky.
Expressionist works date from the turn of the century to the post-war years of the 1940s. Two major Expressionist groups are discussed. Die Brücke (The Bridge), was a band of artists including Kirchner that formed around 1905 and sought to unite a new generation of northern artists. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which formed around 1911, was a more intellectual and experimental group including Kandinsky,
Marc, and Jawlensky.
Kirchner was the leader and most gifted member of a group of artist Die Brucke, the bridge (the bridge to the future!) It consisted of Kirchner, Heckel, and Schmidt Rottluff. It lasted 9 years, dissolving at the outbreak of WWI. It was reaction to the moral stuffiness and repressive politics of the day.
They preferred the Gothic style to the classical and incorporated the dramatic, pointed, discontinuous shapes and bold colors. They wanted to shake the viewer. They equated truth with candor of expression; they were interested in the nervous disequilibrium of the senses. His subjects were his studio life and the imagery of the street, with it light and movement, with spiky drawings and piercing colors. The women are the main stars and the men are backdrops.
Kokoschka was a leading Expressionist from Vienna. He was influenced by Van Gogh, he had a dramatic effect on him especially the self portraits. His portraits had twisting brush strokes and possess a shared neurosis. His painting of his mistress Alma Mahler is like a storm, demonic and turbulent with cold colors.
Max Beckmann was traumatized by the war, discharged because of hallucinations and unbearable depression. He painted the unofficial history of Germany, the psychohistory of a Europe gone mad with cruelty and murder.
The Night is about the abortive Left uprising in Germany, it is full of carved figures of traditional suffering. His work was dismissed as hysterical.
Chaim Soutine was a Jew from Lithaunia living in Paris. He was not a socially committed painter probably because he was a wanderer with no sense of place. His paintings of meat are an homage to Rembrandt who also painted meat. But Soutine’s paintings are convulsive and distorted, manic and full of color.
Marc Chagall was a Belorussian-born French artist whose work generally was based on emotional association rather than traditional pictorial fundamentals. His paintings were fantasy, dream like and referencing Russian Folk lore. He went to design many stage sets and costumes for opera and theatre,
Erich Heckel was a memeber of the Die Brucke group. After seeing the Futurist exhibition in April 1912, Erich Heckel's style became Prismatic, organized in a series of triangular planes. He volunteered for service in WWI, but was deemed unfit to serve and instead worked as a medic in Flanders along with other artists. Heckel was able to continue working on his art during the war years, especially his graphics. His specialty was interior scenes that express melancholy and loneliness. His subjects are usually outsiders like circus performers and madmen in anxious or fearful situations.
Heckel produced his first woodcut in 1904. He made 460 woodcuts, almost 200 etchings and 400 lithographs. Most of these works were executed between 1903-23. Heckel especially loved the color woodcut despite the fact that this medium was quite laborious because each block had to sawed apart and inked separately. Heckel frequently used irregularly shaped formats and often refers to his paintings in his graphics. His graphic output declined in the 1920s but resumed after WWII.
In 1937, The Nazis deemed his art "Degenerate." 729 works were expelled from German museums. In January 1944, his studio was bombed and all of his blocks and plates were destroyed. He later moved to Lake Constance where he took up graphics again but these later works are overshadowed by the genius of his early works.
Hermann Max Pechstein
In 1906, he joined Die Brucke. In 1910, he moved permanently to Berlin where he was elected President of the Neue Secession. He exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1912 and was therefore expelled from Die Brucke having violated their policy of only exhibiting together. In 1914, he traveled to the Palau Islands in the South Seas. While attempting to return to Germany, he was interred in Japan, the United States and Holland. Upon his return, he was drafted into military service and sent to the Somme front but was released in early 1917 after suffering a nervous collapse.
Pechstein produced 850 prints composed of 390 lithographs, 290 woodcuts and 170 etchings. In the early years, Pechstein only printed in very small editions. His often irregular rolling technique resulted in printing differences. He liked to experiment with colored papers and different inks. A print from several blocks (one for each color) was too laborious for his impatient nature so he applied the different colors to the same block.
Otto Mueller
Mueller's images of nudes in nature, for which he is best known, caught the attention of the Brucke artists. He was invited to join the group, and he remained affiliated until its dissolution in 1913.
Mueller served in the military for one year during World War I and was hospitalized briefly in 1917. Unlike that of other Brucke artists, his imagery seems not to have been affected by his wartime experience; his post-war work differs little from that made before the war.
In 1919 Mueller began teaching at the Breslau Academy and continued there until his death. He traveled extensively in Eastern Europe during the 1920s and his art of the period reflects his fascination with the region's gypsy culture. Mueller's interest in printmaking was primarily in lithography. Of his total oeuvre of 149 prints, he made only 6 woodcuts and 1 etching. The rest were lithographs.
Schmidt-Rotloff
Modigliani
The characteristics of Modigliani’s sculptured heads—long necks and noses, simplified features, and long oval faces—became typical of his paintings. He reduced and almost eliminated chiaroscuro (the use of gradations of light and shadow to achieve the illusion of three-dimensionality), and he achieved a sense of solidity with strong contours and the richness of juxtaposed colours. Modigliani was not a professional portraitist; for him the portrait was only an occasion to isolate a figure as a kind of sculptural relief through firm and expressive contour drawing. He painted his friends, usually personalities of the Parisian artistic and literary world (such as the artists Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz, the writer and artist Jean Cocteau, and the poet Max Jacob), but he also portrayed unknown people, including models, servants, and girls from the neighbourhood. In 1917 he began painting a series of about 30 large female nudes that, with their warm, glowing colours and sensuous, rounded forms, are among his best works. In December of that year Berthe Weill organized a solo show for him in her gallery, but the police judged the nudes indecent and had them removed.
In 1917 Modigliani began a love affair with the young painter Jeanne Hébuterne, with whom he went to live on the Côte d’Azur. Their daughter, Jeanne, was born in November 1918. His painting became increasingly refined in line and delicate in colour. A more tranquil life and the climate of the Mediterranean, however, did not restore the artist’s undermined health. After returning to Paris in May 1919, he became ill in January 1920; 10 days later he died of tubercular meningitis. The next day Jeanne Hébuterne killed herself and her unborn child by jumping from a window.\
The Blue Rider
Alexej von Jawlensky was a Russian artist, working in Germany and Switzerland. He was originally influenced by the Fauves but then developed a more expressionistic style with vibrant colors and dynamic brushstrokes. He painted hundreds of portraits in this manner revealing soulful impressions of the sitter.
In 1913 Marc painted a vision of apocalypse over-whelming innocent life. The vision is a chaotic scene where the animals flee in terror from the flames. Through the use of diagonals, Marc constructed a very severe and organized composition, which provided balance and order to a scene of confusion and chaos.
Kandinsky started painting late, around the age of 35. Influenced by Fauvism, his landscapes were lusciously colored, romantic and referenced Slavic fairy tales. He abhorred illustration and décor. He wanted his paintings to describe spiritual states.
Was he the first to make an abstract painting? He was the first to expel objects in his work to reach a higher intensity of feeling.
