German Expressionism

Brandi Hudson

Pat Lefor

Topics in Art History: German Expressionism

9th June 2013

German Expressionism

Expressionism as a term has been utilized in an art historian’s lexicon

for years as all art is a means to communicate or express ideas, evoking some

form of a response in the viewer. However the beginning of the 20th Century

saw the term Expressionism take on a meaning within art in Germany that would

forever change the definition of the word. It would become a means of

describing what art conveyed in terms of emotion and an inner pathos of the

artists behind the works, as Vassily Kandinsky would describe it the “inner

necessity.” The two major groups within the movement of German Expressionism,

Die Brüke and Der Blaue Reiter, would have the same influences and goals,

utilizing a wide range of styles and subject matter “to depict the expression

of inner meaning through outer form” (Arnason, p.141). This paper examines

what would ultimately distinguish the two groups with their own uniqueness of

message.

At the turn of the Century in Germany, the country was a loose gathering

of independent states and the art that was produced at the time was

reflective of this political situation. The separate states made possible for

2German Expressionism: 1905-1925

there to be schools of artistic thought existing yet isolated from one

another, thus making impossible a real unified movement within Germany; there

was a sense of nationalism but no cohesiveness of a movement. In Berlin,

Anton von Werner was the chief representative of a school of artists whose

sole function was to glorify the Kaiser and the royal family. In other cities

like Dresden and Munich there were also artistic institutions that were

devoted to history and genre painting. However during the 1890’s, opposition

to these schools arose with various ‘Secession” groups that “aimed to raise

the standard of exhibitions by encouraging knowledge of French Impressionist

art, and to promote international exchanges,” (Dube, p.8). Both groups within

German Expressionism would come directly after the Secessionists groups and

use the movement as a reaction against both academic styles and the existing

social, moral and political fabric.

Expressionism emerged as a broad artistic movement simultaneously in

various cities across Germany and Austria in the first two decades of the

twenty first century as a response to a widespread anxiety about man’s

increasingly discordant relationship with the world, his lost feelings of

authenticity and spirituality. The Expressionists were reacting against

traditional and academic art that was pervasive in society as well as wanting

to overturn the stiff bourgeois social moors of how to live your life, of

sexuality and of relationships between men and women. Inspiration by such


artists as Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and James Ensor

encouraged the Expressionists, from both groups, to distort form and employ

strong colors to convey a variety of anxieties and yearnings. The two groups

would build upon the Post-Impressionists as well as being influenced by

Primitivism and Fauvism while also drawing inspiration from their own native

traditions of medieval sculpture, woodcuts and folk art.

June 7th, 1905 is recognized as the birth of the Expressionist movement

when Die Brüke (The Bridge) was formed in Dresden, led by Ernst Ludwig

Kirchner, he said of Die Brüke that they as artists wanted freedom in their

work and lives as well as independence from the older established forces. The

name Die Brüke had been chosen by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff as an indication of

their faith in the art of the future to which their work would serve as a

“bridge” linking “all revolutionary and fermenting ideas,” (Arnason, p.142).

Kirchner would be the spiritual conscience of the group, insisting that they

express their inner convictions with both sincerity and spontaneity. The main

members of Die Brüke were Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl

Schmidt-Rottluff (all having originally been students of architecture) they

as a group would challenge the traditional academic styles of art. Kirchner’s

own words from a woodcut broadsheet accompanying the Die Brücke (fig. 1)

exhibition at the Seifert factory, Dresden, in 1906 said, “with faith in

progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together


all youth. As youth, we carry the future and want to create for ourselves

freedom of life and of movement against the long-established older forces.

Everyone who reproduces that which drives him to creation with directness and

authenticity belongs to us" (Dube, p.28).

Kirchner’s quote above was written to attract support for the first

exhibition of Die Brüke but could have been applied as the credo for young

artists throughout Germany and Austria leading up to World War I. The new

ideas and attitudes about society were abundant, calling for a new means of

expression. Socially, the young artists were publicly protesting the

hypocrisy and materialistic decadence of all in power. In art, they were

rebelling against the old tyranny of the Academy while simultaneously defying

the new tyranny of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism whose bright colors no

longer seemed meaningful in the fast-moving, amoral, machine-age world in

which this new generation suddenly found themselves in.

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a group of artists from the Neue

Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM) in Munich, Germany. The founding members

of the group were Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter, joined by

Russian emigrants Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von

Werefkin. Der Blaue Reiter lasted from 1911 to 1914 as a second fundamental

component to the Expressionist movement. The group was formed in response to

the rejection of Kandinsky's painting Last Judgment (fig. 2) from an NKVM


exhibition, Kandinsky’s painting contained swirling abstract forms and

apocalyptic suggestions, thus being deemed too obscene for public display.

Though Der Blaue Reiter lacked an artistic manifesto, they did publish

an Almanac in 1912 (fig.3). The group was centered predominantly around

Kandinsky and Marc and its members were also united by their high regard for

the Medieval and Primitivism art forms (as in Die Brüke), as well as their

love of Cubism. It has been said of Der Blaue Reiter that they “were quite

naturally more sophisticated, more intellectual, and less primitive…as they

instead sought to evoke emotional intensity through impact and distortion,

stressed by the spiritual and symbolic properties of natural and abstract

forms,”(Hunter, p.117). At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Franz Marc

and Auguste Macke were drafted into German military service, and were killed

soon after; the Russian members of the group, Kandinsky and Alexej von

Jawlensky, were all forced to return home. Der Blaue Reiter immediately

dissolved.

Within both groups there were differences in opinion, artistic

approaches and aims that varied from artist to artist. However despite these

differences the artists, in Der Blaue Reiter, shared a common desire to

express spiritual truths through their art. They believed in the promotion of

modern art and the connection between visual art and music, the spiritual and

symbolic associations of color, as well as a spontaneous, intuitive approach


to painting. Members of both groups were unhappy with how society was

working, Modernity was scaring them and they all believed there was a

disconnect felt between communities with a tremendous sense of isolation. One

major difference between Die Brüke and Der Blaue Reiter was that while Die

Brüke was angry about this disconnect, painting in grim fashions, Der Blaue

Reiter thought that if they wanted to see society and humanity change, then

it would in turn have to change within ‘ourselves’. Der Blaue Reiter felt

that these spiritual truths need to happen internally and were of the belief

that once you change yourself there is a ripple effect that projects outward

and into the ethos.

One distinction of the German Expressionists is their embracing of works

on paper, particularly printmaking and drawing, which helped them define

their Modern aesthetic involving a kind of radical simplification and

flattening of forms. Printmaking also helped them to spread their images more

widely, thus making their cause more broadly known. Since the Expressionist

movement was happening in a time of intense social and political

transformation, printmaking also became a method of promoting as well as

criticizing certain aspects of government and politics.

In 1906 Die Brücke published their manifesto, using as their template a

relief woodcarving. “Since their goal was the essence of art, above all form

and color, painting was not intrinsically more important to them than the


graphic media; and above all they favored the woodcut,” (Duber, p.25).

Kirchner was an admirer of Albrecht Dürer, which influenced him to revive the

art of the woodcut. With the woodcut they created an angular form and line

that would become an independent means of expression. It was with this that

they sensed and consciously tied themselves to their German roots of

traditional art from the 16th Century. The woodcut would go on to become

popular with the group, whose jagged expression and inclinations to

Primitivism were well served by the stark, crude forms that the wood

elicited.

Of the Brüke group, Emil Nolde was already an accomplished etcher by the

time he made his first woodcuts. Nolde’s Prophet of 1912 (fig. 4) looked to

Late Gothic German woodcuts as well as the prints of Edvard Munch. Here Nolde

uses intense black and white contrast with bold, jagged shapes, thus

exploiting the natural grain of the woodblock, gouging it with angular cuts.

His lithographs, which differ in expression from the rugged forms of this

woodcut, include Female Dancer (fig. 5), which has been hailed as one of the

greatest German Expressionist prints. Nolde appreciated the artistic freedom

afforded him by the medium of the lithograph and would go on to experiment,

brushing ink directly on the stone to create thin, variable washes of color.

He was interested in the body as an expressive vehicle, much like Kirchner,

and made sketches in the theaters and cabarets of Berlin. However when


looking at Female Dancer the associations are more with the primitive and

tribal. Nolde had studied the work of non-European cultures in museums such

as the Berlin Ethnographic Museum and concluded within himself that Oceanic

and African art possessed a vitality that Western art lacked.

Kirchner, in both his black-and-white and color woodcuts, developed an

intricate, linear style that looked back to the woodcuts of Dürer and Martin

Schongauer. In his Head of Henry van de Velde from 1917 (fig. 6) we see a portrait

that has complex surface patterns made of v-shaped gouges which contrast to

the smoothness of Heckel’s color woodcut entitled Standing Child from 1910 (fig.

7). Heckel reserved the color of the paper for the model’s skin and would

employ a technique created by Munch (three woodblocks for each color of

black, green and red inks) to achieve a brilliant, abstracted landscape

behind her. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Three Kings (1917) (fig. 8) clearly shows

in the mask like faces the influence of not just the ethnographic museums but

also Byzantine art. We also see the same jagged line employed by Kirchner

that had been picked up through Cubism.

Die Brüke saw the reviving of the woodcut as an affirmation of their

national heritage and the “flatness and simplification that was developed in

their woodcuts over time would help them to clarify their reductive style in

painting,” (Figura, pg. 54). Painting would allow them to follow a more

subjective line than they could as architects and they brought a frenzied


dedication to their work. Wanting no instruction, they would simply rely on

their gut and raw emotion. The four members felt that they would be able to

best preserve their visions, strength and honesty this way and they would

place uncompromisingly high demands upon themselves and on the world around

them. These demands would give them the power to reject both traditional

ideals and traditional skills. Believing that art could not be taught, their

conception became one of an original creativity, not one of technique,

painting their internal dialogue whether it be angst, pathos or a

psychological state.

Art historian Donald Gordon explored findings of the influence that Van

Gogh and Munch had on the Expressionists in his article “Kirchner in Berlin,”

published in 1966. He shows just how direct an influence both Van Gogh and

Munch were, specifically on Kirchner. There were two major events that would

happen between 1905-06 that became highly important to the development of

Kirchner’s early works. The first was a comprehensive exhibition of fifty

works by Van Gogh in Dresden, November 1905. In February of 1906 Evard Munch

also had an exhibition of a smaller scale. It is thought that part of the

rapid expansion of Die Brüke to include Pechstein and Nolde was due to the

shared regard and appreciation for Van Gogh’s work that they all had. Bleyl

saw photographs of some of Van Gogh’s works as well as other French Post-

Impressionists displayed in 1906 at the Dresden International Arts and Crafts


fair. Donald Gordon tells of Pechstein stating that he and Kirchner secretly

saw Van Gogh’s by bribing a worker at the Arnold Salon sometime around 1906-

07. The influence of Post-Impressionism and Van Gogh on Schmidt-Rottluff gave

him the same freedom in the use of colors as the other members. Nolde would

also be influenced by the colors and spontaneous brush stroke in which Van

Gogh applied, painting thickly, working with nature, and he would use the

brush, his finger or even scraps of cards to achieve his intensified

composition, such as in his work In the Corn (fig. 15) of 1906.

If we look at Van Gogh’s painting Two Lovers (fig. 9) and Kirchner’s

Moonrise: Solider and Girl (fig. 10) we see that “not only is the stance of the

male figure in the Van Gogh Lovers adopted by Kirchner, but the content of the

two works is identical,” (Gordon, p.339). Both works employ a bold color

palette of blues, reds, greens and pinks but Kirchner pushes this a step

further than Van Gogh by not only exaggerating the hues but by also

incorporating purple with red streaks, ultramarine and violet in the trees as

well as pinks, blues and orange in the sky. Gordon feels that this painting

by Kirchner “is the first tentative link in Germany between the twentieth and

nineteenth century expressionism,” (p.339). Even in looking at portraits by

Van Gogh and Kirchner we see his influence over the artist. Comparing

Kirchner’s Self Portrait (fig. 13) to Van Gogh’s Portrait of Eugéne Boch we see the same

level of draftsmanship and treatment of composition.


Kirchner would look at Munch’s handling of composition, how he would

unify his figures that were on different spatial planes and in how Munch

would place the figure with frontality compositionally. Specifically if we

look at Munch’s painting of 1903, Young Woman on the Bridge (fig. 11) and

compare it to Kirchner’s Doris Standing, (fig. 12) we see him employing the same

type of frontality of the female figure. Kirchner’s Doris and Munch’s Young

Woman both have the head placed identically forward, with the same level of

“bold contouring, heightened emphasis upon the eye-pupils, and rigid

centering of eyes, nose and mouth within the flat, pale and undifferentiated

plane of the face,” (Gordon, pg. 340). This is not to say the Kirchner copied

Munch or Van Gogh, but rather he would take from Munch’s mood and Van Gogh’s

color and then go on to apply both, eventually creating his own style of

expressionism.

For the artists in Der Blaue Reiter, Van Gogh would inspire and

influence just as much. Alexj von Jawlensky would take from him a crude form

of Pointillism as well as color. He would say of his art that he “understood

how to transform nature into colors appropriate to the ardour of my soul. The

pictures were glowing with color. And my inner self was contented” (Dube,

pg.114). For Marc, he would go to Paris in 1903 and 1907 and encounter the

works of the Impressionists, which would be a turning part in his life.

Although it may not be apparent in his works, he would write in his diary


that Van Gogh was who would give him a lasting impression, calling him the

most authentic of painters. When the almanac Der Blaue Reiter was published in

May 1912 it included articles in the visual arts, music and theater by

Kandinsky and others as well as having reproductions of works by Kandinsky

and the group. It also included art of primitive peoples, the Far East,

Egypt, Folk Art, Medieval woodcuts and works by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse

and the Brüke group. The aim was, as Kandinsky said, “to unite in one place

the efforts which are making themselves noticed so forcibly in every sphere

of the arts, and whose fundamental purpose is to push back the existing

limits of artistic expression” (Dube, pg.105).

Die Brüke and Der Blaue Reiter were also looking at their emphasis of

the rough form of the human body. The “roughness” was a reaction against

Classical art and the German Expressionists would use instead of a hard

Gothic line and angularity. Despite developing their own styles amongst one

another, this hard Gothic angularity was infused within their work along with

the idea of the crystalline shape being spiritual as well as referencing the

Gothic notion of light being divine. An example of this is Kandinsky’s 1909

painting Landscape with Tower (fig. 16), where we see his application of the

influences from Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh as he starts to move into

abstraction by dissolving form. In this work Kandinsky is painting the

essence and the energy of the objects on the canvas, and we begin to see the


subject of the work becoming of little importance other than the color

harmonies. Kandinsky quickly progressed with this style to produce numerous

works that are remote from any subject, the motif as a pretext he creates

within the forms. The color and form become structural elements with no

transition between objects; they do not represent anything, and the use of

blocks of color and shape give the works power.

There is a parallel with the two groups here as the Brüke artists,

mainly Schmidt-Rottluff, also concentrate on the impression of nature rather

than nature itself, meaning to intensify the expression as well. In 1912

Schmidt-Rottluff was himself at the brink of abstraction, pushing the extreme

limit of the possibilities of reversing the role of the object. If we look at

his painting Houses at Night (fig. 17) we see he is on the brink of an

Expressionism abstraction much like Kandinsky’s work of the same period. His

colors are no longer clearly defined and there is no longer one explicit

meaning. It was the closest any of the Brüke artists would come to complete

abstraction but according to Dube, “Schmidt-Rottluff was not willing to

sacrifice the power of explicit statement, or to represent an idea without an

object,” (p.67). Die Brüke would use bold applications of color, typically

very high-keyed and non-naturalistic. Their lines were crude and unlike

Kandinsky they shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. Der Blaue Reiter


embraced continuing this movement towards abstraction unlike Die Brüke who

quickly turned back to form.

Die Brüke’s catalogue of work was mainly comprised of landscapes, nudes,

street life and carnival performers and they used the images of the modern

city to convey a world of hostility and alienation in which a sense of

foreboding and barely restrained violence seemed ready to burst forth from

the canvases. Beginning with the artists painting landscapes and quickly

moving from there to other subject matter, their work was partly a reaction

to the world around them. Within their landscapes they would eventually add

the human figure and paint nudes that had not been posed making the form

relaxed. They were not afraid to paint highly sexualized events, akin to

their French counterparts the Fauves, and they made them look tame by

comparison. They attached themselves to the Fauvist color and started working

in a commune.

Die Brüke was not about being aesthetically pleasing or capturing a

photographic moment but about what makes you feel within yourself, in your

gut. Their manifesto was bold and they wanted the lower classes to be

represented. One reason that drew Brüke to invite Nolde (other than his love

of Van Gogh) to join was that he was a peasant, which was the class of

society Kirchner was looking to represent. They all had a sense that the

world was not healthy, that we as a people were rotting and that the world


needs to see this and react to it. It was in hopes to make people reflect and

change that they produced this art that was unlike any other.

Since Die Brüke’s work was not being received well in Dresden, which was

more traditional and conventional, they relocated to Berlin in 1910, changing

everything as Berlin was much more industrialized. Berlin at the time was the

cultural and artistic capital of Germany, a city of labyrinth streets,

unplanned growth, modern buildings, revolutionary politics and a large

migrant population. This move prompted a new confrontation with the modern,

urban world and led them to develop powerful social criticism. This change

from country to city would create a major shift in their work, painting urban

subject matters instead of nature and pantheistic ones. Here we also begin to

see Cubist tendencies arrive. Kirchner especially was drawn to the street

life of Berlin and produced the Street series. Die Brücke and Kirchner's

publication of Chronik der Brücke (Brücke chronicle, fig. 18) focused on the

freedom of life and of movement against the long-established older forces and

with diverging convictions of the members, it brought about the collapse of

the group in 1913.

Motivated by the same anxieties that gripped the movement as a whole,

fears about humanity's place in the modern world, its lost feelings of

spirituality and authenticity, Kirchner had conflicting attitudes to the past

and present. Both Kirchner and Kandinsky saw this but Kandinsky took a more


healing approach rather than the more jagged approach Kirchner took. Kirchner

saw himself in the German tradition, yet he rejected academic styles and was

inspired by the modern city. The human figure was central to Kirchner's art,

where Kandinsky would rarely use the figure. It was vital to the pictures

that took Kirchner’s studio as their backdrop, pictures in which he captured

models posing as well as aspects of his bohemian life. For Kirchner, the

studio was an important nexus where art and life met. But the figure also

informed his images of Berlin, in which the demeanor of figures in the street

often seems more important than the surrounding cityscape. And, most

commonly, he depicted the figure in movement, since he believed that this

better expressed the fullness and vitality of the human body.

Kirchner's expressionistic handling of paint represented a powerful

reaction against the Impressionism that was dominant in German painting when

he first emerged. For him, it marked a reaction against the staid civility of

bourgeois life. He would always deny that other artists influenced him though

Fauvism was particularly significant in directing his palette, encouraging

him to use flat areas of unbroken, often unmixed color, and simplified forms.

Kirchner believed that powerful forces, enlivening yet also destructive,

dwelt beneath the veneer of Western civilization, and he believed that

creativity offered a means of harnessing them. This outlook shaped the way in

which he depicted men and women in his pictures, people who often seem at war


with themselves or their environment. It also encouraged his interest in

Primitive art, in particular that of the Pacific Islands, for he considered

that this work offered a more direct picture of those elemental energies.

Primitive art was also important in directing Kirchner to a more simplified

treatment of form. Primitive sculpture undoubtedly inspired his own approach

to the medium, and his love of rough-hewn, partially painted surfaces.

In Berlin Kirchner painted a series of Street Scenes filled with

elongated forms, painted with jagged lines and acidic highly charged color

with a crystalline effect, in which spaces are confined and sharply tilted to

a perspective that seems to have been painted from above. Street, Berlin (fig. 19)

and Five Women on a Street (fig 20) are two in a series that reflects Kirchner’s

social commentary on consumerism and modernity. Kirchner was known to make

rapid sketches of his street scenes and would then work them into more formal

drawings in the studio before the final painting. He was trying to capture

the animation of his first impressions and their sense of movement within.

“In the charged atmosphere of the street, and the distorted forms, Kirchner

describes the condition of modern urban life, one of close physical proximity

coupled with extreme psychological distance,” (Arnason, p.143).

For Kandinsky, painting was above all deeply "geistig" (spiritual). He was

highly influenced by the sensorial properties of color and sound, and sought

to visualize these properties through increasingly abstract compositions. As


a painter, Kandinsky saw himself as a prophetic figure, whose mission was to

translate the most profound human emotions into universally comprehensible

symbols and visual sensations. He saw music as the most transcendent form of

non-objective art, and strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually

rich paintings. In organizing "Der Blaue Reiter" we would see a group of

artists whose aims and approaches would vary, as in Die Brüke, and the group

in general believed in the promotion of modern art and the possibilities of

spiritual experience through symbolic associations of sound and color. The

group released an almanac (The Blue Rider Almanac) and held two exhibitions. As

well, Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), the first

theoretical dissertation on abstraction that articulated his view of the

artist as a spiritual being who is affected by and communicates through line,

color, and composition. He produced both abstract and figurative works at

this time, in compositions of complex patterns and brilliant colors such as

Composition VII (fig. 21). Kandinsky was a synesthetic and thus had an intense

reaction to color and shape. He heard sound and most of his works were named

after music. He would put color and line together to make a complete

symphony. He heard a note with each line of color, all of which were very

specific and it was with this that non-representational art began. Marc,

Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter looked to the Fauves and Matisse a lot, but

pushed it to a new level, one of an idea of healing, of spiritual truths that


the viewer could look at and have a sense of calm and new insight. Kandinsky

puts his soul on the canvas, giving you the ability to gain depth and balance

by connecting with his work.

Of the Brüke artists, only Pechstein was overtly inspired by Matisse,

which we can see in his paintings from 1911-12, specifically Summer in the Dunes

(fig. 22). However with Der Blaue Reiter it would be a different story. Macke

saw a Matisse exhibition in Munich around 1908, and it was such a tremendous

experience for him that in 1910 he was still writing enthusiastically about

Matisse to Marc in their letters. Kandinsky drew from Matisse, who had freed

up the use of arbitrary color and line. He also looked back to Gauguin for

the simplicity of form. Kandinsky said in 1908 that his chief influences

after traveling and seeing European exhibitions were Cézanne, Matisse and

Picasso. The early paintings of Matisse in particular, which also influenced

the Brüke, were the main influence and Kandinsky later acknowledged their

common ground when he declared that he had moved to abstract painting from

Expressionism.

Von Jawlensky actually met with Matisse, who encouraged him in what he

was trying to do, and then went on to work in his studio for a brief time.

This allowed him to be able to make valuable contributions to the group. Von

Jawlensky acquired from Matisse a breadth in his landscapes, such as Yellow

Houses (fig. 22), which brings a static quality and severity of composition,


dark contours that hold the brilliant masses of color on the picture plane

with no human figures, avoiding narrative. For Von Jawlensky, whether it is

still life or landscape, the motifs became interchangeable. His works become

less and less susceptible to definition, such as in Solitude of 1912 (fig. 23)

where his contouring is less prominent, being replaced by bands of color that

have an intensifying effect on each other, serving to give the motif even

more symbolic significance. This is the ‘synthesis’ he had always preached,

the “use of artistic forms to express the interpenetration of impressions of

the external world and experiences of the inner world” (Dube, pg. 116-17).

Kandinsky would title his works with inspiration from music to begin his

association with image free art, with titles such as “Composition,”

“Improvisation,” or “Impression.” Under the title “Composition” he would

create ten major paintings that he considered to be his masterpieces of

expressing the “inner necessity” of the artist, his intuition and his

emotional response to the world. Arnason says in discussing Sketch for Composition

II (fig. 24) that a closer look at the painting “reveals that the artist is

still employing a pictorial vocabulary filled with standing figures, riders

on horseback, and onion-domed churches, but they are now highly abstracted

forms in the midst of tumultuous, upheaving landscape of mountains and trees

that Kandinsky painted in the high-keyed color of the Fauves,” (p.149).

Kandinsky was stated as saying that this painting had no theme but Arnason


feels that the work is essentially divided into two sections. He states that

the first on the left is one of deluge and disturbance and then the right of

lovers reclining, comparing the work to that of Matisse’s lovers reclining in

his work Le Bonheur de vivre (fig. 25) but with Kandinsky ultimately balancing

the opposing forces to his spiritual views of the universe.

Kandinsky would also clarify his abstraction of pure color and forms in

terms of the spiritual and musical ideas. It is thought that his “romantic”

viewpoint may be associated with Gauguin’s statement that “color, which is

vibration, just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at

the same time most elusive in nature: its inner force.” Kandinsky would also

stress the “inwardness and the intuitional qualities of his style of

painting, and utilized the arabesque and free color lyricism stemming from

both Symbolist and Fauve art,” (Hunter, pg. 118). This went along with

Kandinsky’s belief that painting should be created with an inner tension,

looked at with mood versus being representational of any form or object.

Being more spiritual with some nonobjective abstractions, Marc felt a

strong spiritual connection to animals and Primitivism that goes back to the

belief that animals have straightforward lives, that they live simply and

with no hatred. Marc would find not just peace, but solace and inspiration.

He would write, “The impure men and women who surround me…did not arouse my

real feeling; while the natural feeling for life possessed by animals set in


vibration everything good in me” (Hunter, pg. 120). Sam Hunter feels that

these primitivistic urges and the manner in which Marc expressed them also

were related to Gauguin. Marc’s style however was more severe than

Kandinsky’s as he looked more directly at Cubism, which had a strict

formality. However both Marc and Kandinsky both would have a “psychology of

expression” with a mysticism attached. The growing process of abstraction in

Der Blaue Reiter’s work was in a sense linked to this undercurrent of

mysticism and romantic transcendentalism. Marc pursued spiritual and mystical

values through art, but his symbolism identified feelings with animal’s

existence in nature rather than on a purely abstract system of color forms as

Kandinsky pursued. For Kandinsky, blue is the color of spirituality: the

darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal, which we

know from his writings in his 1911 book On the Spiritual in Art. Marc would create

his own personal color code, with blue being masculine and spiritual, yellow

feminine and joy and finally red representing violence.

Marc felt that animals and nature were emotionally and physically

inseparable. He would try to contrast the natural beauty of animal life with

the sordid reality of man’s existence. The essential mysticism of this

approach was so Germanic in its sense of alienation. Marc would go on to

incorporate in his masterpiece, Animals’ Fate, (fig. 26) the intensified

spectral color of Robert Delaunay (who worked in Orphism, an offshoot of


Cubism) and Cubist and Futurist vocabulary. The pictures original title had

been written on the back of the canvas, “All being is flaming suffering.” The

work looks like an apocalyptic holocaust, a blue deer in the center head

lifted, red foxes on the right, green horses at the top left, with what look

like shards of glass piercing the canvas from all angles. His blue deer

represented hope, but this hope is about to be extinguished by the falling

tree in the forest, and implying that on earth we are being destroyed by the

cataclysms of war. Shortly before his death in action on the front lines of

WWII, Marc sent a postcard to his wife of Animal’s Fate saying, “It is like a

premonition of this war,” Marc wrote, “horrible and shattering. I can hardly

conceive that I painted it. It is artistically logical to paint such pictures

before a war – but not as stupid reminiscences afterwards, for we must paint

constructive pictures denoting the future” (Hunter, pg. 121).

For both groups their different techniques conveyed the emotional state

of each of the artists involved, along with their own personal comment on the

modern world. The arrival of Expressionism announced new standards in the

creation and judgment of art. Art was now meant to well up from within the

artist rather than deriving from a depiction of the visual world. The

character of the artist’s feelings became the standard for assessing the

quality of a work of art, rather than the composition of forms. It should be

noted, however, that neither Die Brücke, nor similar sub-movements, ever


referred to themselves as Expressionist, and in the early years of the

century the term was widely used to apply to a variety of styles, including

Post-Impressionism. Its example would later inform Abstract Expressionism,

and its influence would be felt throughout the century in German art. It was

also important for the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s.


Works Cited

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Architecture, Photography. 4th ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Print.

Dube, Wolf Dieter. The Expressionists. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Print.

Elderfield, John. Modern Starts: People, Places, Things: [exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art,

New York, 7.10.1999 - 14.3.2000]. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000. Print.

Ettlinger, L. D. "German Expressionism and Primitive Art." The Burlington

Magazine 110.781 (1968): 191-201. Print.

Figura, Starr, and Peter Jelavich. German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse ; [in

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Art, 2011. Print.

Gordon, Donald E. "Kirchner in Dresden." The Art Bulletin 48.3 (1966): 335-66.

Print.


Hunter, Sam, John M. Jacobus, and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture,

Architecture. 3rd ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Print.

Kandinsky, Wassily, and Hajo Düchting. Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944: A Revolution in

Painting. Köln: Taschen, 2000. Print.

Kandinsky, Wassily, Kenneth Clement Lindsay, and Peter Vergo. Kandinsky,

Complete Writings on Art. New York: Da Capo, 1994. Print.

Lloyd, Jill. German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP,

1991. Print.

Raabe, Paul. The Era of German Expressionism. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1985. Print.

Rifkind, Robert Gore. "Wild Passion at Midnight: German Expressionist Art."

Art Journal 39.4 (1980): 265-67. Print.

Selz, Peter. "E. L. Kirchner's "Chronik Der Brüke"" College Art Journal 10.1

(1950): 50-54. Print.

Simmons, Sherwin. "Ernst Kirchner's Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury, and

Immortality in Berlin, 1913-16." The Art Bulletin 82.1 (2000): 117-48.

Print.

Simmons, Sherwin. "Split-Identity in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Woodcut Cycle

(translated)." Zeitschrift Für Kunsstgeschichte 70.3 (2007): 409-32. Print.

Wye, Deborah, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Kirchner and the Berlin Street. New York:

Museum of Modern Art, 2008. Print.

Documents

German Expressionism