Expressionist Art

Before World War I

The painter of the future will be a colorist such as has never existed.--Vincent Van Gogh

What is Expressionism?• German Expressionist relating to the

movement in German art from about 1905 until about 1930 that favored distortion and exaggeration of shape and color to express emotion. Expressionist tendencies were first seen in the work of Vincent van Gogh and Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944).

• German Expressionists sometimes paired harsh colors and strong lines with socially significant subjects. Others, such as the Russian artist Wassily Kandinksy, who immigrated to Berlin, emphasized elements of spirituality, using color to move viewers beyond the physical world to a state of emotion.

Artists by Movement: Der Blaue Reiter

Centered in Munich, 1911-1914 • Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue

Rider) is a group of Expressionist artists led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. One of the primary goals of the group was to use art to express spirituality. Other artists associated with the movement : August Macke, Gabriele Munter, Alexei Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Heinrich Campendonk The movement was disrupted by World War I, in which Franz Marc and August Macke were killed.

Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, Klee, Munter, Campendonk

Apocalyptic Enthusiasm• Marc's visionary images push

towards an "apocalyptic enthusiasm" in the years preceding the war (1912-14); along with other contemporaries, like the writer Herman Hesse, this generation almost longed for the apocalypse to come as the only way to purge what they saw as a materialistic, hopelessly bourgeois and corrupt society.

• Durer’s Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

Franz Marc & Kandinsky

• Franz Marc had seen Kandinsky's 1909 show and had written in a review: "Art today is following paths our fathers would never dare or dream of. In front of such paintings as these, it is as if one were in a dream, and could hear the horsemen of the Apocalypse."

• Kandinsky’s Rider of the Apocalypse. 1911

Franz Marc: Tower of Blue Horses

• By 1913, he was ready for his own Four Horses of the Apocalypse. They are blue (the spiritual color), they bear the crescent moon upon their chests -- and beyond them rises the rainbow of the new and spiritual world.

Franz Marc: The Fate of the Animals(1913)

• The most poignant moment is at center where the blue deer throws its head back in one final scream while the red ray of light cuts through the white of the deer's neck. In this massacre of the innocents, we get a kind of crucifixion scene that expresses an apocalypptic end of the world. On the reverse side of the canvas, the artist had written this inscription: "And All Being is Flaming Suffering."

Franz Marc: Tyrol (Fall,1913, Spring 1914)

• Looking at the Tyrol, he saw the Virgin and the Infant Jesus riding on the crescent in the sky.

Look Being in the face!

• Marc wrote: "The goal of art is to reveal unearthly life dwelling behind everything, to break the mirror of life so that we may look Being in the face."

Marc’s End of Combat Painting

• He had marked the Tyrol with a dead tree in the shape of the scythe of death, and had written "Death and its wounds do not corrupt the soul. I do not really envision death as destruction... it is absolute deliverance... `Death where is thy sting?"

Kandinsky: Sketch Composition

• . . . a beautiful work is a marriage of the inward and outer elements in terms of the law.--Wassily Kandinsky.

• In his book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky argued that color, like sound, evokes emotions.

Kandinsky’s Ideas• Kandinsky was committed to using art as a way of changing the

world. For him, the artist was a kind of messiah or prophet whose job it was to communicate a higher truth to humanity.

• 'Our minds are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal,' he warned. 'The nightmare of materialism which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.‘

• Kandinsky would do everything he could to loosen the grip of the material on the soul, and he exhorted his fellow artists to do the same: 'Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his art is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will some day reach to heaven.'

Kandinsky: the artist as messiah • At first, Improvisation 30

(Cannons) appears to be a random assortment of brilliant colors, shapes, and lines. But in the visual chaos, one can discern leaning buildings, a crowd of people, and Just one year later, Germany entered World War I.

• War themes were prevalent in many works of the German Expressionist movement. Chaotic scenes such as Improvisation 30 may also refer to the end of the world as foretold in the Bible.

Kandinsky's Composition IV

• An awareness of Kandinsky's philosophy leads to a reading of Composition IV as expressing the apocalyptic battle that will end in eternal peace.

Composition VII

• Composition VII is the pinnacle of Kandinsky's Pre-World War One artistic achievement.

• Composition VII combines the themes of The Resurrection, The Last Judgment, The Deluge and The Garden of Love in an operatic outburst of pure painting.

Improvisation XXX1, 1913

Improvisation XIV, 1910

• In his early abstract paintings, such as Improvisation XXXI, 1913, Kandinsky pushed the limits and produced artworks that seemed to convey sheer energy.

• Colors affected Kandinsky profoundly, like pure emotions.

Dunaberg, 1909.

Kandinsky

• “His uncompromising attitude to life and art, his faith in the unconquerability of the human spirit, came with him from Russia.”

• Although Kandinsky spent most of his life in Germany and Paris, he retained his fervent belief in Orthodox Christianity, remained immersed in Slavic literature and music, and continued to speak his native language with his wife.

August Macke:In the Storm

• August Macke was a close friend of Franz Marc. In 1912 the two painters visited Paris. In 1914 he made another trip, this time to Tunisia in Northern Africa with Paul Klee.

• Macke was often critical of the Blue Rider group in a humorous way.

August Macke:In the Garden Gate

• In 1914 he had to join the German army and was killed in action. He was only 27 years old.

Gabriele Munter

• Gabriele Munter had met Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and the two became companions.

• In 1909 she bought a little house in the scenic Bavarian foothills outside Munich. Here Gabriele Munter and Kandinsky spent the summer months. The house soon became a meeting point for the artists of The Blaue Reiter group.

Theosophy: Philosophical or Religious Teaching

• Kandinsky and Munter believed in Theosophy philosophical or religious teaching based on a mystical insight into the nature of God and the world through direct knowledge, philosophical speculation, or a physical process, such as painting.

• His belief in the spiritual power of art was related to his adherence to certain doctrines of theosophy, a cause that promoted deeper spiritual reality through intuition, meditation, and other transcendental states.

• Theosophy influenced numerous late nineteenth early twentieth century artists. The Theosophical Society, with which theosophy is now generally identified, was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

Gabriele Munter: In 1914 Kandinsky left Gabriele Munter.

Munter and Kandinsky

• During the Nazi era, Gabriele Munter kept dozens of paintings by Kandinsky and others hidden in a basement room of her house. These and a large number of her own paintings were donated by Gabriele Munter shortly before her death. Today they are the main attraction of the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich.

• Fifty-seven of his works were confiscated by the Nazis in the 1937 purge of "degenerate art." Kandinsky died December 13, 1944.

Paul Klee: Menacing Head, 1905

• Paul Klee played with forms and colors - sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative but reduced to the essential.

• His paintings and graphics are small in size, nearly miniature.

• In 1933 after the Nazis took power in Germany, Paul Klee was dismissed from his position as a professor of the Art Academy in Dusseldorf and went back to Switzerland.

Paul Klee: Temple Garden

Heinrich Campendonk-1889-1957

• Man and Beast Amidst Nature

• He fled from the Nazis to Holland where he worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Alfred Kubin-(Czech) 1877-1959 • Alfred Kubin's works of art are

much different from the colorful works of his friends of The Blue Rider group.

• His art is somber and nightmarish. Alfred Kubin's subjects are often apocalyptic. He was a loner in his art and his personality. His favorite media was ink drawing mixed with watercolor. Alfred Kubin was the only artist of the group who was not outlawed by the Nazis.

• The Torch of War-1914

Marc’s Peaceful Animals

• Man plays only a small part in Marc's work.• He wrote that `the irreligious humanity which

lived all around me did not excite my true feelings, whereas the virgin feeling for life of the animal world set alight everything good in me.‘

• Animals are central in his work.• At first they are symbols of nature, but later

they become the messengers of a higher spiritual world.

Marc’s Peaceful Animals

Marc’s Peaceful Animals

Marc’s Peaceful Animals

Marc’s Peaceful Animals

Marc’s Peaceful Animals

The Wolves (Balkan War)

• By 1913, however, Marc sensed the impending disaster of world events. The Wolves (Balkan War) is a personal allegory of the 1912-13 War that ultimately led to World War I. He no longer used peaceful and gentle animals like horses and deer; instead, he presents a pack of wolves.

Killed in action at Verdun in 1916

• He was killed in action at Verdun in 1916, hit in the temple by a grenade splinter on a reconnaissance ride - on a horse.

• Marc was killed in World War I at the age of thirty-six, but not before he had created some of the most memorable paintings of the Expressionist Movement.

Klee painted mourning painting

• Marc’s wife was staying with the Klees when the news of his death came.

• The text reads --"Once emerged from the gray of night,Then heavy and precious and strong from the fire

• In the evening filled with God and bowed...

• In the gray band – Ethereally now rained round with blue, floating off over mountains snowcaps to wise constellations."

Der Blaue ReiterApocalyptic Vision

• Their apocalyptic vision suggests his metaphysical desire to push "behind the veil of appearance" to the "other side" to seek "the hidden things in nature . . . the inner spiritual side of nature."

Exuberant Colors, Emotions, and Spiritual States

• They shared an interest in abstracted forms and prismatic colors, which, they felt, had spiritual values that could counteract the corruption and materialism of their age.

• The name Blaue Reiter (“blue rider”) refers to a key motif in Kandinsky’s work: the horse and rider, which was for him a symbol for moving beyond realistic representation. The horse was also a prominent subject in Marc’s work, which centered on animals as symbols of rebirth.