Looking at 20th Century Art: 1900 to 1945

Unit 4: Die Brücke and the "Degenerate" artists

Overcome by the rapid march of industrialization and growing rift between agricultural Prussia and the industrial south many German artists looked back with nostalgia on a pre-industrial era. They were also highly influenced by the ideas of the existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who had claimed that the modern world was decadent and needed to be redeemed by the creative individual or Übermensch.

One such artist was a young architect from Dresden called Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) who in 1905 became the leader of a group who called themselves Die Brücke or The Bridge. Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in which he writes of man's spirit as the bridge to freedom inspired the name. The bridge also represented a link between traditional German painting and modern Expressionist art.

Kirchner was joined in the group by fellow architectural students Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel and later Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller and Emil Nolde. The artists believed in a new brotherhood of man and felt they could achieve this ideal by working together in a creative commune. In this way they followed a similar path to the Arts & Crafts Movement in that members of the group modelled themselves on what they believed had been the practices of the medieval craft guilds with artists working and living together in a type of creative commune where all arts were equal.

However, their ethos had a more militant element, in their manifesto they called upon all youth to unite:

"We, who possess the future, want liberty of action and thought with respect to the hidebound older generation. Anyone who honestly and directly expressed what urges him to create is one of us."

They worked together in a rented shop converted into a studio, lived together and even holidayed together, spending their summers at the Moritzburg Lakes near Dresden. Their relaxed, communal lifestyle and nude bathing reflected a cult of nature that was growing in Germany at the time.

Bathers at Moritzburg Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

(1909/26. Tate Gallery, London)

A poster created by Fritz Bleyl to promote the first Die Brücke show in 1906 was banned by the police because of the suggestion of pubic hair.

The nude was extremely important to the Brücke artists; they regarded it as the foundation of all pictorial art. The model for the poster was a 15-year-old girl called Isabella, whom Bleyl rather condescending described as:

"a very lively, beautifully built, joyous individual, without any deformation caused by the silly fashion of the corset and completely suitable to our artistic demands"

Frank and open sexuality was also part of the ethos of the group who promoted the so-called 'natural' as opposed to 'artificial' relations between sexes.

Like the Fauves the Brücke artists used colour as a means of expressing emotion. Stylistically they looked to some of the great revolutionaries of the post impressionism era such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and of course Paul Cézanne.

Cézanne's influenced can be seen when we look at his earlier version of Bathers (1900-05. The Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania). From Gauguin came a fascination with the primitive.

Here we can see a woodcut by Kirchner entitled Bathers Tossing Reeds (1910). This composition is based on a pastel sketch made in 1909 during one of many excursions to the Moritzburg Lakes. This fascination with primitive art

forms led to the Brücke artists becoming regular visitors to the Dresden Ethnographic Museum, which held a variety of primitive art from the African and South Pacific colonies.

They found Primitive Masks especially inspiring and they experimented with replacing facial likenesses with more rigid mask like images. We will be looking more closely at the influences of Primitive art in the next Unit.

Kirchner Dancer with Lifted Skirt (1909). They also regarded the lean pubescent figures of their woman/child models as primitive metaphors of 'nature'.

Erich Heckel's Standing Child (Fränzi) (1911) coloured woodcut that became an icon of German Expressionist art.

Fränzi and her older sister Marcella were the favoured models of the group at this time. Their slim pre-pubescent looks harmonized with the artists' style of painting using elongated forms and sharp angles. The two models spent the summer on the Moritzburg lakes outside Dresden during the summer of 1910 where the Brücke artists painted some of their most celebrated outdoor scenes.

In Kirchner's Four Bathers (1909. Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal) Marcella can be clearly seen sitting on the left of the painting.

Although they adopted a fairly idealist view of society the Brücke artists still had a very acute sense of business. Right from the start, they saw the potential in producing prints of their work as a way of reaching a broader public. In addition, they especially embraced the idea of woodcuts a graphic process that had traditionally been regarded as a manual rather than fine art, Lithographs were another.

From the start, they set about recruiting private patrons who they called 'passive' members. Charging an annual subscription these members would receive a Die Brücke membership card, an annual portfolio of prints and an annual report. The subscription started at 12 marks, which rose to 25 marks in 1912. The portfolios, which were printed between 1906 and 1912, cost the collectors 97 marks. A century later, complete collections of the prints are nearly priceless.

Kirchner's woodcut portrait of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff served as the cover for the fourth Brücke portfolio, which was devoted to Schmidt-Rottluff's graphic work. The near abstract looking images on the left show examples of the new visual vocabulary being developed communally by the group. The prominent wood grain emphasises the materials and the process of the woodcut medium. The Brücke artists helped to revive the woodcut tradition in Germany and their style of the woodcuts was greatly influenced by the work of the German medieval and early Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach as well Japanese prints and the works of more recent artists such as the Swiss-French artist Felix Valloton and of course Munch.

As nude bathers in the lakes of Moritzburg, the Brücke artists had felt liberated by the natural world and their art reflected this naïve freedom. However, the modern city provoked an entirely different response and was transformed by them into a hostile, alien world, with distorted figures and colours. Kirchner started this process with his Street, Dresden (1908. MoMA).

He would continue this theme having moved to Berlin where he turned to the seedier side of street life for his inspiration. By this time, the group was already going its separate ways. Kirchner's rather egotistical history of the movement called the Chronik der Brücke (Brücke chronicle), led to the final break up of the group.

Kirchner's Street Scene Series features harsh linear figures trapped in a threatening 'concrete jungle' of pre-War Berlin. His streets bustle with activity, but there is an inescapable mood of degeneracy in the scenes of bars and cabarets, traffic, shop windows and the faceless masses.

Kirchner began painting these scenes in the autumn of 1913 and continued until 1915 after he has enlisted in the army. He claimed that this had been the loneliest time of his life when he spent a lot of time wandering the streets. The women he met on the streets, who were mainly prostitutes, he began to see as symbols of modern Berlin. These were not the downtrodden tawdry whores of the impressionists these were glamorous and aloof almost as if they had just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. In fact rather than capturing the seedier side of Berlin life, Kirchner could have been sketching designs for one of the city's leading fashion houses - notice the detail, plumed hats, fur collars, hobbled skirts.

Five Women in the Street

(1913. Museum Ludwig, Cologne)

Street, Berlin(1913. MoMA)

You can almost hear the rustling of skirts as these two elegant women stroll together along the Berlin Street. Black suited sinister looking men seem to be watching their every move. Notice the man looking into the shop window, his cane nearly touching the woman's leg, perhaps indicating ownership as either a pimp or a potential customer

. Potsdamer Platz (1914. Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

The women in Postdamer Platz stand on an island almost as if on a revolving display in a shop window. The widow's veil all too common during World War I, would seem to indicate a respectable scene of everyday life in this well-known Berlin landmark. In fact, the veil was a ruse used by older prostitutes to hide their fading looks and elicit sympathy.

There is a sense of danger about the painting with figures approaching from every angle, even we as the viewer appear to be about to climb onto the traffic island.

In this scene Berlin Street Scene (1913. Neue Galerie, New York) two female prostitutes occupy the centre of attention, but they are hemmed in by the men on the right and the traffic on the left giving a claustrophobic and threatening feel to the scene. The man on the right gazes into a shop window, perhaps

surreptitiously watching the reflection of the women behind him who like the objects in the shop are also for sale.

Kirchner's use of colour became even more dramatic during the First World War. He was drafted into the army as an artilleryman, but invalided out with a nervous breakdown. After leaving the army he became addicted to morphine.

Artillerymen

(1915. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Self Portrait as a Soldier

(1915. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio)

Painted in 1915, Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier documents the artist's fear that the war would destroy his creative powers. He is dressed in army uniform his face is haggard, a cigarette hangs loosely from between his lips. His eyes remain unseeing and empty without pupils but with the iris reflecting the blue of his uniform. The lost right hand and bloody stump is a metaphorical rather than literal depiction of his War damage. The mutilation was intended to represent the loss of his creativity, artistic vision, inspiration and ability to paint.

After his breakdown Kirchner moved to Davos in Switzerland where he continued to paint, but with his anger dissipated his later paintings were left with a flat emotionless feel.

Paysage d'automne avec kiosque

(1926. private collection)

His work was condemned as degenerate during the Nazi era and many of his paintings were confiscated and burnt. Finally, in 1938 fearing that Switzerland would fall to Hitler, Kirchner committed suicide.

The First World War deeply affected the other Brücke artists work, Karl Schmidt Rottluff (1884-1976) served on the Eastern Front and was so disturbed by the horrors of war that he turned back to religion to create a cycle of religious woodcuts to try to come to terms with what he saw. He did this by using the suffering of Christ as a metaphor for the suffering of people and nations.

Erich Heckel's previous strong outline and bright colours became more subdued in the lead up to the War, as can be seen in his triptych

Convalescent (1913. Fogg Art Museum). In the centre of the triptych is a sickly looking woman propped up on her bed. She is playing with her fingers in an agitated fashion and her illness appears to be more mental than physical. On the right panel are three large sunflowers, their faces turned towards her as if they are radiating their life giving sunlight. On the other panel, is another plant with a woodcarving of a peasant woman perhaps representing the healing power of nature in full bloom?

Apart from their own artistic work, Brücke members' two most important aims were to establish contact with artists of similar convictions and to introduce their avant-garde art to the public through collective exhibitions. Max Pechstein joined the group in 1906 when he was still painting in an Impressionist style. The influence of Die Brücke and the works of Matisse completely transformed his painting style. Having moved from Dresden to Berlin he became one of the founders of the Neue Secession, a group that was formed as a break away movement from the Impressionist-dominated Secession. Otto Mueller and Emil Nolde were the other founders of the Neue Secession after having their work rejected by the Secession.

Mueller's images of nudes in nature, for which he is best known, caught the attention of the Brücke artists. He was invited to join the group, and he remained affiliated until its dissolution in 1913.

Although considerably older than the rest Emil Nolde was actively courted by the group. He was a great exponent of primitive art using bright clashing colours and thick paint techniques sometimes using canvas rags rather than paintbrushes to apply the pigment.

As can be seen in:

Wildly Dancing Children (1909. Kunsthalle Kiel)

Dance around the Golden Calf

(1910. Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich)

His paintings were so shocking that mothers used to threaten their badly behaved children by warning them that Nolde would come and get them and smear them all over his canvas.

Primitive Masks had a particular appeal as can be seen in:

Mask Still Life III

(1911. Nelson Gallery of Art, Atkins-Museum, Kansas City)

Of course, it was not just the Brücke group who were deeply affected by the First World War; artists outside of the movement were equally damaged by its horrors. We will be looking at the artists of the Blaue Reiter movement in Unit 8 who were highly influenced by the spirituality of art. Other artists became embittered and ultimately inspired by their sufferings and that of the people around them.

George Grosz was one of the most important artists of the post war era. He had already become a cynical commentator on the seedier side of Berlin society during the war years. This mood can be seen in his darkly depressing Suicide (1916. Tate) in which a suicide is portrayed hanging from a lamppost with a body sprawled in the foreground together with a fleeing figure and roaming dogs. In the window, surveying the scene stands a scantily clad prostitute with her ageing client. The scene symbolizes the moral corruption Grosz believed had permeated Berlin society during the war years.

By the end of the War Grosz had started to focus his pictorial attack on what he later termed The Pillars of Society (1926. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) the military, the clergy and above all the middle class.

When Germany lost the War in 1918 and the emperor had abdicated, many artists supported the socialist call for the creation of a new Democratic Germany. They formed activist groups like the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst Workers' Council for Art and the Novembergruppe. Taking its name from the month of

the Weimar Revolution the Novembergruppe hoped to bring about a new unity in art, architecture, crafts and city planning. The group's ultimate aim was to bring the artist into close contact with the worker.

The group's main activity was holding public exhibitions throughout the 1920s, but it also sponsored lectures and avant-garde concerts and film presentations. Its support of socialism and the ideal of unification of the arts were concerns shared by other German organizations of this period. The most notable of these was of course the Weimar Bauhaus, which was established in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius as a school of architecture and applied arts and would go on to be the main centre of modern design in Germany in the 1920s.

By the 1920s, Grosz together with fellow artists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, had become deeply entrenched with a new realist movement in Germany generally known as Neue Sachlichkeit or New Realism. In their paintings and drawings they vividly depicted scenes of corruption and moral degradation during the lead up to the Nazi era. Disturbing examples of this work are Beckmann's depiction of unemotional brutality in The Night (1918-19. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf) and Dix's post war mutilations such as The Skat Players (1920. Oil on canvas with photomontage and collage, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie) and his anti War Triptych (1929-32. Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden). Other leading artists involved in this realism movement included Christian Schad and Georg Schrimpf.

Because so many German Expressionist artists fought against everything that the Nazi party stood for it left them exposed to retribution once the Nazis had come to power. In summer 1937, Joseph Goebbels' Degenerate Art commission seized the works of many of the leading avant-garde artists of the time, confiscating them from both private and public art collections. Especially hard hit was the modern art division of the Berlin National Gallery which lost 136 paintings, 28 sculptures, and 324 drawings. In all 16,558 expressionist, abstract, and socially critical works, as well as the works of Jewish artists were taken. At the same time, avant-garde artists living in Germany were forbidden to paint. Although most of the art was either sold abroad or destroyed, Goebbels reserved some works for an 'instructional' and propaganda exhibit entitled Entartete Kunst, which opened in Munich and then traveled travelled

to large German and Austrian cities with the intention of educating people about the degradation of modern art.

Further Reading

German Expressionist Woodcuts (Collections of Fine Art in Dover Books) by Shane Weller (Paperback - 28 Mar 2003) Expressionism: a Revolution in German Art by Dietmar Elger (Paperback - 1994) Expressionism (Taschen Basic Art Series) by Norbert Wolf (Paperback - 27 Feb 2004) German Expressionism: Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter by Barry Herbert (Hardcover - Jul 1983) Women Expressionists (Oct 1988) by Shulamith Behr German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (28 Jun 1991) by Jill Lloyd Die Brucke: Color and Clash - The Height of German Expressionism (Taschen Basic Genre Series) by Ulrike Lorenz and Norbert Wolf (2008) Neue Sachlichkeit and German realism of the twenties: [catalogue of an exhibition held at the] Hayward Gallery, London 11 November 1978-14 January 1979 by Wieland Schmied (1978) New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Art and Photography in Weimar Germany 1919-1933 (Big Art) (April 1995) by Sergiusz Michalski Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years by Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller (2003) Kirchner (Taschen Basic Art) by Norbert Wolf (2003) The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours and Prints, 1912-30 (20 Mar 1997) by Frank Whitford George Grosz: Berlin - New York (14 Jul 2008) by Ralph Jentsch and Enrico Crispolti An Autobiography by G Grosz ( 27 Mar 1998) George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic by Beth Irwin Lewis (Paperback - 1 Jul 1992) Self-portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-50 by M Beckmann (Paperback - 3 Dec 1999) Max Beckmann by Max Beckmann and Sean Rainbird (Hardcover - Jun 2003) Max Beckmann and the Self (Pegasus Series) by Wendy Beckett (Paperback - 1 Mar 2003)

Dix (Midsize) by Eva Karcher (Paperback - 30 Aug 2002) Match: Otto Dix and the Art of Portraiture by Marion Ackermann and Daniel Spanke (Hardcover - 1 May 2008)

Additional Websites

Art for a Change (The German Expressionists - Essay by artist, Mark Vallen) Bauhaus Museum of Design Hammer Museum (Woodcut Exhibition) Museum of Modern Art (Die Brücke Exhibition) National Gallery of Australia (Otto Dix's Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924) Otto Dix (Paintings) Spartacus Educational (Article on Otto Dix's anti War stance) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (German Portraits from the 1920s) The City Revie (Rough, Raw and Riotous Exhibition - Neue Gallerie 2004) Wikipedia (Techniques of Printmaking)

Discussion Forum

German Expressionism is often described as being 'as much a state of mind as a type of visual art'.

• Having looked at the work of the Die Brücke and post First World War artists would you agree with this view?

Let us know your thoughts in the Discussion Forum.

We will be meeting Pablo Picasso for the first time in Unit 5. For an excellent overview of his early years spend some time looking at:

• Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906 (An Exhibition website from the Washington National Gallery of Art)