Expressionism – my daily art display

Bathers at Moritzburg by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Bathers at Moritzburg by Ernst Kirchner (1909)

My last three blogs looked at Italian Renaissance paintings but today, and in my next blog, I want to move in a completely different artistic direction and look at the life and work of a man who is widely acknowledged as the greatest artist of German Expressionism. His name is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Before I look at the early life of Kirchner I suppose I should explain a little about the term Expressionism. Expressionism came about around 1905 and lasted until about 1920. It is a term given to a style of painting, music, or drama in which the artist or writer seeks to express the inner world of emotion rather than external reality. This term Expressionism is applied to art which seeks to cause an emotional response, not to actual pictorial content but to the exaggerated style adopted by the artist who is seeking to reflect his inner self. The term is generally applied to modern European art, where exaggerated forms and vivid colours were employed. In Germany, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was disillusionment with the old fashioned academic styles of painting and this prompted a flood of experimentation and innovation. The artists were desperately searching for a new way to express themselves through the medium of painting and by doing so convey their personal experiences of their new modern world with all its advancing technology. Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him or her. They accomplish their aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. The actual term Expressionism was first used in the preface of the catalogue for the 22nd Berlin Secession Exhibition of April 1911 to describe the work of Braque, Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck and Marquet.

Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg in northwest Bavaria in 1880 and is now looked upon as one of the most important representatives of Expressionism. Kirchner was brought up in a middle–class family environment. His father was an industrial chemist. Kirchner showed an early interest in drawing and as an extra-curricular activity, during his school years his parents arranged for him to have drawing and watercolour lessons at home. His parents support for his love of art was not wholehearted as they saw no future in their son becoming an artist and so after taking his final school leaving exams they insisted he attended the Königliche Technische Hochschule to study architecture. Kirchner went along with his parents’ plans as he believed the course would also allow him to have further training in art, such as freehand and perspective drawing. He took his preliminary diploma in 1903 after which he spent the winter term studying in Munich.

Whilst at the Hochschule he became close friends with another student Fritz Bleyl and later they, along with two other architecture students, Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, after successfully completing their architecture degree course in 1905, formed an artist group which they called Die Brücke (The Bridge). The name, given to their group by Rottluff, was to symbolise a connection between Germany’s artistic past and future and they intended that their art would be that very link and the way forward. Theirs was a radical group which was opposed to middle-class conventions, which they considered lacked fervour, and it was their aim to shun the traditional academic style of art and initiate a new style of painting which would be more in keeping with modern life. They still saw their artistic work as belonging firmly within the tradition of German art, especially the art of Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder. This young group of artists was anti-establishment, liberal in their attitude and full of revolutionary ideas. Like all new groupings the four founders decided that the group should have its own manifesto setting out its ambitions. Kirchner was in the forefront of thinking up the wording for the manifesto and he clearly summed up what the group wanted to achieve:

“….. freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces…”

The group met regularly at the Dresden studio of Kirchner. The lifestyle of this group was Bohemian in character. In the Royal Academy 2003 exhibition catalogue Kirchner – Expressionism and the city, a quote from Fritz Bleyl described his friend’s first studio, which had formerly been a butcher’s shop:

“…[it was] that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist’s materials — much more like an artist’s romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student…”

In Kirchner’s studio social standards were largely ignored. Art historians quote reports of the goings-on which took place at the studio and recount tales of “much impulsive love-making and naked cavorting”. During these meetings at Kirchner’s studio, the artists met to study the nude in group life-drawing sessions. However, Kirchner wanted to distance himself from the rigid and painstaking academic style of life drawing and he and his fellow artists would instead sketch the naked women, quickly in quarter-hour sessions (Viertelstundenakte) and by so doing, they believed that they were able to capture the fundamental nature of their subject as instinctively as they could. The models who posed nude for Kirchner’s group were not professional models; they were just part of Kirchner’s circle of friends, who were only too willing to become part of this newly-founded art movement.

The lifestyle of the group in some ways was mirrored in the flower-power days of the 1960’s or the punk rock days of the late 70’s. They hoped and succeeded in shocking the bourgeoisie. Normal social conventions were abandoned and the group’s studio became a place almost of decadence with group life-drawing sessions, frequent nudity and casual love-making. Like Matisse and Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was fixated with the female nude, as a symbol of his own intense sexuality as well as it being a seductive return to primitive nature. The intention of Die Brücke artists was to wage battle against the constricting forces of bourgeois culture. To them this culture was linked indelibly with mediocrity, corruption, and weakness. Kirchner believed fervently on self-empowerment and complete freedom from convention and this could be seen in his early art which often concentrated on erotic subject matter. In the paintings done by Kirchner and the other artists of this group they often depicted the female nude crudely as both “primitive” and submissive. For them this depiction of the female signified both male domination and male virility.

Die Brücke poster for the 1906 exhibition

In the September and October of 1906, a year after the formation of Die Brücke, the first group exhibition was held at the K.F.M. Seifert and Co. in Dresden. The works exhibited focused on the female nude and Fritz Bleyl designed the lithographic poster for the event. In 1906, Kirchner met Doris Große, who became his favoured model and remained at his side until 1911 when he decided to leave Dresden and move to Berlin. Doris would not make that journey. From 1907 to 1911, Kirchner liked to spend part of his summers at the Moritzburg lakes which lie to the north of Dresden. He and the other members of Die Brücke art group, along with their friends relaxed amidst the countryside tranquillity and led a relaxed communal lifestyle and embraced the popular German culture of going back to nature and dispensing with such frivolous things as clothes !

My featured painting today is by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and is entitled Bathers at Moritzburg which he completed around 1910. It is a painting depicting people who have for a short time shunned the claustrophobic and overpowering life in the city and have gone back to the freedom of nature. This is their reunion with nature. It is a painting full of energy. There is vigorous activity all around. The first thing that strikes one about this work of art is the overstated colours he has used in this painting. We have the contrast of the yellow-orange flesh of the bathers with the blue of the water. This contrasts serves to emphasise the nudity of the figures. Although I have dated the painting as being completed around 1909, the original effect may have been too extreme for Kirchner as in 1926 he repainted parts of the picture making the colours lighter and the surface of the painting more even. It is presently housed in the Tate Modern in London.

As a leading proponent of Expressionism how did Kirchner view his style? In a letter written in 1937 to art dealer Curt Valentin, he explained the development behind his own Expressionist style:

“…First of all I needed to invent a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion…I practised seizing things quickly in bold strokes, wherever I was and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself, and I found new forms in the ecstasy and haste of this work, which, without being naturalistic, yet represented everything I saw and wanted to represent in a larger and clearer way. And to this form was added pure colour, as pure as the sun generates it…”

In my next blog, I continue looking at the life of Ernst Kirchner as he moves to Berlin, suffers mentally from the rigours of World War I, splits from Die Brücke and spends the last years

The Night by Max Beckmann

Today I am exploring the unusual world of Expressionism, to be more precise, German Expressionism, and will be looking at a painting entitled The Night by the German artist Max Beckmann, who was one of the most important German painters of the 20^th century. Beckmann has always been compartmentalised as an Expressionist painter but he himself, railed against that tag.

Expressionism materialized in different artistic circles across Europe but its zenith was the period between 1905 and 1920. Expressionism as a general term refers to art in which the image of reality is more or less heavily distorted in formand colour in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas about it. In expressionist art the colours used were often strong and highly intense and often non-naturalistic. The brushwork is typically free and paint application tends to be generous and highly textured. Expressionist art inclined to be poignant and sometimes had mystical qualities. It would often look at themes of belonging and alienation. In some ways Expressionism was the art of unrest and the search for truth. The German Expressionists were loosely gathered in two groups. One was called Die Brücke (The Bridge) and the other was Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). There are numerous well known artists who could be looked upon as Expressionist artists. The ones who come to mind are Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Wassiliy Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Beckmann just to mention a few.

Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884, the youngest of three children. His family were of a middle-class background. His father was a grain merchant but died when Max was just ten years of age. He received a thorough education and spent several years at a boarding school. At the age of fifteen and despite family objections, he decided on an artistic career and applied to the Königliche Akademie in Dresden but failed the entrance exam. In 1900, aged sixteen years of age, his artistic studies finally began with his enrolment at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School for a three-year course and it was here that he learned to draw from antique statues and eventually progressed to human models. It was also at the Academy that he met fellow art student, Minna Tube, whom he married three years later. They went on to have a son, Peter. After the course ended in 1903 he went to Paris where he studied at the private Académie Colarossi, which was an alternative art institution to the government-sanctioned École des Beaux-Arts that had, in the eyes of many promising young artists at the time, become far too conservative. In 1906, he was in Florence financed by winning the German art prize, the Villa Romana Prize and it was in this Italian city he was able to study the works of the great Masters. The following year, he moved to Berlin and three years later in 1907 he participated in the Berlin Secession, which was the predominant voice of modern German painting. The term Secession, which came from the Latin secessio plebis (the revolt of the plebeians against the patricians) was the term applied to groups of artists who secede from academic bodies or associations in protest at the constraints. The three main Secessions were those of Berlin, Munich and Vienna. The Berlin Secession was founded by Berlin artists in 1898 as an alternative to the conservative state-run Association of Berlin Artists.

Beckmann’s paintings from this period are characterized by the legacy of Impressionism, with landscapes and beach scenes painted with stippled brushstrokes which evoked the play of light across shapes. He was held in such high regard by his colleagues that, in 1910, he was elected to the executive board of the Secession and was the youngest member ever to achieve such a distinction. However because he preferred painting to policy making, he resigned the following year in order to devote himself full-time to his art work. Conflict within the Berlin Secession eventually led to a further schism in 1910 and the new group called itself the Neue Secession (New Secession). In 1914 the rejection of works by some members of the Berlin Secession again led to further disagreements and several artists, including Beckmann left the Berlin Secession to found the Berlin Freie Secession (Berlin Free Secession), which existed until 1924.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Beckmann volunteered as a medical orderly and served time on the Belgium front. Before the onset of war, he, like many other Germans, rationalized the necessity of war and believed in their countries aims. He believed war could cleanse the individual and society. However, after experiencing day after day the widespread destruction and horrors of the war, he became disillusioned with the conflict and rejected the glory of military service. In 1915 the dreadfulness of what he witnessed took its toll on him and he suffered a nervous breakdown and was moved to Belgium and later Frankfurt.

Following World War I, his work changed radically in reaction to the horrors he had witnessed. Initially he focused on biblical scenes, but during the 1920s he created more contemporary allegories and painted devastatingly realistic portraits and figure paintings associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) group, with whom he exhibited in 1925, but never formally joined. He now rejected traditional perspective and proportion creating taut, airless pictorial structure of space and planes with an absence of bright colour and thick brushstrokes of Expressionism. He saw the world as a tragedy of man’s inhumanity to man and saw life as a carnival of human folly. In 1925 his marriage to Minna Tube, which had slowly been unravelling, came to an end and the couple were divorced. That same year he married his second wife, Mathilde von Kaulbach and he was appointed professor at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt.

In 1933 the Nazis came to power and Beckmann was declared a “degenerate artist”. He was dismissed from his post at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut and a ban was placed on all his exhibitions. All his works in German museums were confiscated. The Nazi art policy at the time applied to everything that did not conform to Nazi goals. It was their battle against what they termed überfremdung (foreign infiltration). He moved from Frankfurt to Berlin where he believed due to its size and large population he could become more anonymous. In 1937 he moved to Amsterdam where he lived in poverty in self-imposed exile failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the US. He remained there until 1948 at which time he was finally granted a US visa. From there he and his wife moved to the USA and he took up a post at the School of Fine Arts, Washington University in St Louis. Later he moved to New York where he was given a professorship at the Art School of Brooklyn Museum.

Max Beckmann died of a heart attack whilst out walking in Manhattan, the day after Boxing Day in 1950. He was aged 66. His wife, Mathilde, died six years later.

My featured painting today entitled The Night was painted by Max Beckmann during 1918 and 1919. It is housed at the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf. This is an early example of Beckmann’s grotesque and appalling visionary paintings with its misshapen figures. Before us we have an overcrowded room in a modern city. Beckman himself said he wanted this work to be looked upon as a large modern history painting tinged with a sense of evil. Three men have invaded the room and are terrorising the occupants. The man to the left has been hung by the neck by one of the intruders while a man with a bandaged head, wearing waistcoat and tie and smoking a pipe, twists his arm. Two women can also be seen in the scene. One, in the central foreground with her back to us, possibly the man’s wife, wears red stockings and is bound to a post after having been raped. The second woman whose feet we can just make out at the top right of the painting, is held upside down by a man whose hat resembles the type worn by Lenin. To the right a blonde-haired child is about to be dragged off. Under the table we see an old phonograph, the sound from which may have been used to blot out the cries from those being tortured. Also partly under the table on the left we see a dog whose head is raised as he howls for help. This is a scene of urban hell, an unfathomable and vile scene.

In his book Max Beckmann, Stephen Lackner commented on this work saying:

“… Beckmann sees no purpose in the suffering he shows; there is no glory for anybody, no compensation, … Beckmann blames human nature as such, and there seems to be no physical escape from this overwhelming self-accusation. Victims and aggressors alike are cornered. There is no exit…”

Maybe, one should remember that 1918 was the time of the German November Revolution which resulted in the replacement of Germany’s imperial government with a republic and which unleashed tremendous savagery and terror across the country. In 1919 there followed a general strike which was brutally put down by the authorities. Maybe in some way Beckmann, in his painting, was alluding to such horrors perpetrated by mankind on mankind. I find it very hard to fathom the state of the artist’s mind when he was painting this work. Had he personally suffered so much mentally and lost all hope in humanity to depict such violence?