Introduction Toexpressionism

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INTRODUCTION TOEXPRESSIONISM

[Research naturalist movement as socialist-anarchist pastoral utopia beyond class and property.]

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

ConnecticutCollege

New London, CT06320

(This essay was written in 1995 and was slightly polished in 2002, 2007, and 2015. In December, 2010, I added a short discussion of Marc’s Large Blue Horses and a paragraph on the fawn in Deer in the Cloister Garden as an animalized Romantic child and kindred spirit. In 1915, I added a comment on Expressionism’s failure to comprehend the appeal of emotion to the right-wing, military, political and cultural movements which held increasing sway after 1920. )

Expressionism: Chronology and Style (1910-20)

Expressionism emerged in Germany and Austria as a utopian, cultural movement encompassing literature, theater, film, dance, and the visual arts. The artistic heyday of Expressionism was 1910-1920. It began four years before the outbreak of WWI and continued for a few years after the war before burning itself out.

In painting, prints, and sculpture, Expressionism transformed Fauve color and Cubist geometric form with violent, "primitive" expression, color contrasts, angular lines, simplified forms, raging emotion, and burning hopes for a better future. If the Fauves had removed emotion from Post-Impressionist color and brushwork, the Expressionists brought it back with a flaming intensity and outward drama.

Expressionism as Youthful Utopianism

‘Many of the Expressionists in Northern Germany were Democrats, Socialists, or Communists. Their yearning for a modern, democratic Germany were briefly fulfilled after WWI with the collapse of the central imperial government and local revolutions in the various German states (Prussia, Bavaria, etc.). In 1919, a new alliance of liberal democrats and socialists proclaimed a democratic Germany (the Weimar Republic). [1] In the same year, 1919 Feininger designed a woodcut frontispiece for the program of the new Bauhaus architectural school formed in Weimar. Entitled “The Cathedral of Socialism,” it used a new, dynamic, crystalline version of cubist forms to depict a visionary, otherworldly Gothic cathedral reaching into the heavens. We can better understand the optimistic fervor yearnings of this woodcut with a characteristic passage from Transformation, an Expressionist play written in prison by the Socialist, Ernst Toller. (It premiered in Berlin in 1919.)

Now open themselves, born of the world’s womb

The high arched doors of Humanity’s cathedral.

The youth of every people strides flaming

To the glowing crystal shrine they sensed in the night. [2]

The utopian yearnings of most German Expressionism are particularly clear in Max Pechstein’s woodcut inscribed, To All Artists (1919). This was the cover for a Expressionist pamphlet with a manifesto by Pechstein along with other writings calling for dramatic change. Printed in red, the image shows a fiery young man reaching up dramatically in a loyal oath to the artistic cause of Expressionism while calling on all German artists to unite in a movement which was at once artistic, spiritual, and political. While one could trace this strident gesturing and oratory through modern, revolutionary political imagery all the way back to David’s Oath of the Horatii, the Expressionist woodcut introduced a range of distinctly modern values including the idea that art and artists could transform political, social, and spiritual realities with heroic and dramatic acts of individual creation. The focus on intense, hyper-dramatic emotion was also modern.

The Limitations of Expressionist Utopia and Emotion

Expressionists were young artists, not political theorists, economic planners, or advocates of public policy. As such they lacked any coherent social vision or concrete plans for reform. The vagueness of their progressive thinking is clear in a statement of purpose issued in 1906 by the Brücke, a Dresden Expressionist group which later relocated to Berlin.

As believers in evolution, in a new generation of both creators and art lovers, we call together the whole of Youth, intending, as youth upon whose shoulders the future rests, to win freedom of life and action against the entrenched forces of age. [3]

Expressionists poets were equally vague and wildly idealistic in their Socialist language. Johannes Becher’s poem, Brotherhood (1916) has numerous outbursts like the following.

Join in the march! Write Freedom on our banners!!

Our rhythm smash thee, ancient word, for good!

A star looms up. Mark above our plan:

Paradise of Brotherhood. [4]

Although the Expressionists recognized the widespread opposition to modernist art among older Germans, they offered no plan for persuading that hostile audience. Indeed, by calling for artistic revolution and demagoguing older Germans, Expressionism helped guarantee its irrelevance outside its base of young, alienated, radicalized, urban bohemians and cultural critics. In its most extreme form taken by the Communist painter and caricaturist, George Grosz, Expressionism mercilessly savaged all Germans who are “always . . . tasteless, stupid, ugly, fat, … a reactionary of the worst sort”. No wonder middle and upper class Germans were largely hostile to Expressionism (and to most modern art). This is not to suggest that Expressionism didn’t have wealthy patrons, supporters, and sponsors among “progressive” cultural critics, urban collectors, art dealers, and the curators and directors of smaller museums. But these voices were increasingly marginalized in the 1920s and 1930sas German politics turned to the right.

If Expressionism stoked rather than negotiated the hostility of most contemporary Germans, it also ignored the limits of cultural forms tied to extreme emotion. Expressionist artists and their supporters also failed to comprehend the way emotional politics worked more effectively for right-wing causes and for a new German militarismand nationalism outraged by defeat and “defeatism”. This increased in the 1920s and triumphed with the rise of Fascism in the early 1930s when Expressionist artists, writers, supporters, and art works were swept away as “degenerate”.

The Collapse of Expressionism by 1920
Expressionist spiritual, cultural, and social utopianism also collapsed in the face of social, economic, and political fragmentation in Germany after WW1. By the end of hostilities in 1918, Germany was badly weakened politically and economically. Although no foreign troops ever entered native soil, a defeated Germany was forced to accept humiliating surrender terms which inflamed and strengthened right-wing parties.

Emboldened by the Russian Revolution (1917) and by the abdication of the German emperor, German republicans proclaimed a new German Republic a few days later on 9 Nov, 1818. The same day, the German Communist party announced a new German Socialist Republic. With the left now badly splintered, right-ring Gerrman militias (Freikorps) operating outside any governmental command, marched on Berlin, Munich and other centers in 1919-20 and slaughtered thousands of leftists. (The Freikorps continued to terrorize the German left through the early 1930s when they joined forces with the Nazi party.) Adding to German misery at this time was the hyperinflation of 1922-23 which devalued the mark from 42 marks to 1 US dollarin 1920 to 4.2 trillion marks in 1923. Germans also contended with aflu pandemic (1918-20) which killed some 50 million people worldwide.

In the face of economic catastrophe, political fragmentation, and the drift toward right- wing politics, German Expressionism was all but irrelevant. It was, perhaps, inevitable, that any artistic movement stressing "free" personal expression and utopian fervor would soon burn itself out, a victim of its own youthful excesses, emotional extremes, vague abstractions, wildly utopian visions, and revolutionary antagonism to mainstreamvalues and culture. At the onset of the fighting, Franz Marc naively believed a universal war would serve as a purifying fire, an Apocalyptic destruction followed by a new spiritual age led by modern artists. The reality of world war lay elsewhere, in the killing of 20 million people and the German targeting of French cultural monuments, especially Gothic cathedrals which were shelled into ruins.

Two years of combat experience shattered Marc’s ideals so completely that he abandoned his spiritualized animal imagery and described the collaborative work of the Blue Rider Expressionist group as a failed undertaking.

Those Expressionist artists who survived WW1 abandoned emotionally charged colors and violent compositions for more orderly styles and serene, apolitical subject matter tied to nature or fantasy (Kirchner and Nolde). Others, like the Russian Expressionist, Kandinsky, embraced the new Constructivism, albeit with a certain dynamism rooted in his Expressionist past. Looking back from the later 1930s on his youthful dream of an imminent spiritual age, Kandinsky admitted that this period might not come for a thousand years. [5]Still others such as Dix developed a newnaturalism grounded in sharp observation of contemporary German social realities after the war.

Despite its limitations, Expressionism helped pave the way for the more painterly Surrealists (1920-45) including Masson, Gorky, and the early Pollock. Although Abstract Expressionism (1945-60) addressed its own set of concerns distinct from those facing the Expressionists, it continued the larger Western tradition initiated by the Romantics, continued by the Symbolists, and extended by the Expressionists and Surrealists of an art of “direct” feeling and bodily expression liberated from the “confines” of reason.

German Expressionist Groups and Individuals

Most of the Expressionists in Germany belonged to one of two artistic groups: the Brücke (Dresden and Berlin) or the Blue Rider (Munich). Although Nolde shared in the larger Expressionist primitivism with its themes of liberating nature, nudity, and wild dancing, he remained apart from any Expressionist groups and pursued spiritual rather than urban communal rhetoric. He also spurned the Apocalyptic imagery found in the urban dystopia of some Berlin Expressionists (Grosz, Meidner) and the religious imagery of some Blue Rider artists (Kandinsky, Marc).

Originating in Dresden before relocating to the larger, more cosmopolitan center of Berlin, the Brücke (Bridge) included Kirchner, Pechstein, Heckel, Mueller, and Schmidt-Rottluff. Unaffiliated Berlin Expressionists included George Grosz and Otto Dix. After a Fauve period, the Brücke artists moved in 1910 to an Expressionist style drawing on the Symbolists, Munch, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, all well known in Germany. Kirchner’s poster for a Gauguin show in Dresden in 1910 resembles the woodcut style of both Munch and Gauguin. Even more important for the Brücke was the discovery of African sculpture which they used to develop an Africanized “primitive” style of jagged forms, mask-like faces, rough surfaces, and starkly carved woodcut forms.

Brücke Landscape and Utopian Fervor

Most Brücke art from 1910-1920 depicted pre-modern landscape or the modern city, two sides of one coin. Brückelandscape featured a utopian, unsoiled nature imagined outside all contemporary reference and filled with large nudes bathing and romping. In this trend, they had much in common with Fauves like Matisse and Derain, with Symbolists like Gauguin and Hodler, and Post-Impressionists like Cezanne (not to mention earlier Impressionists like Renoir, who died in 1919, and academic painters like Puvis).

In German Expressionism, these landscapes with nudes were directly tied to liberal political, moral, and sexual values and found another closely related subject of great interest, the female nude. The Expressionist search for a primeval, authentic, modern humanity in the nude body set into the woods also drew on the new naturalist (nudist), health, dance, and camping movements sweeping Germany in the early twentieth century.

The Expressionist landscape with nudes also signaled utopian hopes of a new social order freed of class divisions, religious morality (which was usually ridiculed or condemned by Expressionist writers), and, to a lesser extent, German nationalism. (Despite aspirations to universalizing imagery, the German Expressionists proudly claimed their movement as distinctly German and looked back on “German” traditions all the back to the Gothic period seen as a unique period of “German” cultural greatness, spiritual aspiration, and social solidarity. In this selective, nationalistic reading of cultural history, France and England disappear from the understanding of Gothic art. One German bestseller, Langbehn’s Rembrandt as Teacher, even hailed the Dutch artist Rembrandt as the greatest German artist of all time and constructed a German cultural tradition stretching back through the Romantics to Rembrandt and the Gothic.

Brücke Cityscape and a Distopic Modernity

The other side of the coin of Brücke imagery was the modern, distopic city. In paintings and prints, Brücke artists depicted anxious images of modern prostitution, rape, murder, gruesome sex killings, exploited workers, strikes, riots, assassinations, robberies, suicides, corrupt industrialists and bankers, militarists, and the overwhelming horrors of modern warfare at a time when a wide variety of new weapons of mass destruction (tanks, machine guns, long range artillery, poison gas, and eventually airplanes) allowed 10 million people to be killed in four years, many of them in trench warfare fighting for a few hundred yards. In Expressionist art, modern warfare was often as a larger metaphor for other kinds of destruction and, in some artists, utopian hopes for a better future rising from the ashes. .

Grosz and the Socialist Image of the Apocalyptic City

Grosz was an extreme misanthrope and Communist who used his art to satirize businessman and bankers, the military, the clergy, and the German middle class. His experiences as a soldier in WWI left him with am implacable hatred of the army as an institution governed by the worst sort of mindless regimentation, bullying, and tyranny. Although some Expressionists like Marc were patriotic and quickly enlisted, most had terrible fears of military service since it crushed all of the individual liberty they held dear. Kirchner had a nervous breakdown after his service in the army and painted a Self-Portrait as a Soldier with his right hand amputated and wrapped in a bloody bandage to symbolize the destruction of his artistic abilities.

“It’s true, I’m against war, that is, I’m against every system that cages ME. . . . Every day my hatred of the Germans gets new, highly inflammable fuel from the incredibly ugly, unaesthetic, badly dressed look of the most German of them all. … I feel no relationship to this human stew. … Being German always means being tasteless, stupid, ugly, fat, nonathletic … Being German means being as reactionary of the worst sort; … You really begin to wonder how it can be possible that … millions of people exist so mindlessly, so unable to see what’s really happening, people who’ve had the wool pulled over their stupid eyes since their school-days, whose minds have been stuffed with the attributes of ignorant reaction, such as God, Fatherland, militarism.” [6]

Grosz, The City, 1916-17

Using a palette of infernal red, orange, and black, Grosz depicted cosmopolitan Berlinas an Apocalyptic nightmare of corruption and violence. Throughout the violently clashing colors and jagged lines, one senses the dislocating horrors of modern warfare with its artillery explosions and fire, an experience Grosz internalized and reconfigured to add to the violence of the modern city. In this living hell, space is fractured in two by the angular buildings and the two large streets which intersect in the foreground, assaulting the viewer visually with a mob of undifferentiated persons who rush out along the violent diagonals of the streets along with careening trucks and trolleys. Faces are grotesquely caricatured and take on monstrous colors of red, green, and blue. Here the city embodies everything which is modern and thus repugnant to Grosz, especially its endless commerce – seen in the French-named department store and the many other stores and hotels depicted here with their signs. Equally disturbing is the city’s openness to corrupting fashions and ideas from abroad. Thus the French and American names and even the American flag at the upper left, this at a time when American was seen in Germany as the country which embodied the worst aspects of a dehumanizing modernity.

Otto Dix, Self-Portrait as Mars

Like Otto Dix also experienced trench warfare, artillery bombardments, and poison gas first hand as a soldier in the German army. In 1914, he painted a powerful Self-Portrait as a Soldier, using harsh versions of Fauve color with a focus on red smeared on like blood. A year later, Grosz had taken up Cubism or rather, Orphism and Futurism, both of which combined Cubist formal structure with rich color. In his painting, War (Ordnance) of 1914, Dix built a massively dense composition around one of the new giant artillery which Germany had unleashed on Belgium fortifications, the whole compositional structure exploding with little bursts of color like artillery shells exploding.

The same year, Dix painted his Self-Portrait as Mars, thereby allying himself as a creative artist with the god of an unimaginable destruction. Here we can see the Futurist and Expressionist idea of creativity as a double-edged sword which in one instant made something totally new artistically while simultaneously destroying all traditional notions of artistry, beauty, and artistic purpose.