[In Expressionism] the expression was to determine the form, and no longer be obliged to appear in the guise of nymphs, heroes and allegories… [Expressionism is] the process whereby the colours and forms themselves become the repositories of the pictorial idea. (p.7)

1972 is a long time ago, before the politically correct mindset, before feminism, anti-racism and post-colonialist discourse took over university humanities departments. Therefore this book is a remarkably straightforward account of the various groups of German artists who are generally lumped together as ‘the Expressionists’, with none of the usual naming and shaming of artists as sexist, racist, imperialist cultural appropriators, which is so common in art history nowadays (for example, in Colin Rhodes’s book on Primitivism, or Whitney Chadwick’s Women, Art and Society).

The German character

Wolf-Dieter Dube was a senior curator at the Bavarian State Art Collection (home to an extensive collection of paintings by the Blue Rider group of Expressionists) and the book was translated from his original German by Mary Whittall. His German-ness is interesting because it allows Dube to make generalisations about German culture and German character which might not be allowed to non-Germans nowadays.

Comparison of Wilhelm Leibl or Hans van Marées, however much we may admire them, with Courbet or Manet, illustrates how difficult if not impossible it is for a German to produce ‘pure’ art. The harmonious equilibrium of form and content, ideally achieved in a ‘pure’ picture, is all too easily upset by the weight of philosophical concepts, by idealism or Romanticism. This fundamental trait of the German character was to be the mainspring of Expressionism… (p.7)

So a ‘fundamental trait of the German character’ is the impossibility for ‘a German to produce “pure” art’ because ‘the harmonious equilibrium of form and content … is all too easily upset by the weight of philosophical concepts’? Interesting thing for German art curator to say.

Pre-critical theory

It’s also interesting to read a 46-year-old text because it reminds us what used to fill up books like this before the various elements of post-modern art and critical theory came along. For politically correct criticism, among other things, gives the critic something to write about i.e. a whole checklist of indictments which can be applied to anyone and require little or no knowledge or sensitivity to art. For example, it requires only a casual knowledge of Paul Gauguin’s biography or works (pictures of South Sea islanders where he settled in the 1890s) to be able brand him as a racist, sexist, paedophile exploiter of under-aged girls in Tahiti. And so:

Feminist post-colonial critics decry the fact that Gauguin took adolescent mistresses, one of them as young as thirteen. They remind us that like many men of his time and later, Gauguin saw freedom, especially sexual freedom, strictly from the male point of view. Using Gauguin as an example of what is ‘wrong’ with primitivism, these critics conclude that, in their view, elements of primitivism include the ‘dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power both colonial and patriarchal’. To these critics, primitivism such as Gauguin’s demonstrates fantasies about racial and sexual difference in ‘an effort to essentialize notions of primitiveness’ with ‘Otherness’. (Wikipedia article on Primitivism)

Easy, once you’ve picked up the lingo. Thus modern art critics often read as if they’re doing the job of the police, acting as a kind of ‘history police’. If he’d been alive today, Gauguin would have been sent to prison and put on the sex offenders register.

Modern critical theory is all the more useful as a device for generating large amounts of text because modern academics are under unprecedented pressure from the terms of their university tenure to continually generate new essays, articles, lectures and conference papers, to show output and productivity.

So, applying the insights of modern critical policing to the biography, writings and paintings of dead white male artists is an invaluable method for generating copious pages of much-needed text. If you interpret Gauguin’s attitudes as (in effect and despite his own claims to the contrary) a form of collaboration with the French colonial powers to ‘constrain and contain’ the native populations within ‘the visual discourse’ of ‘colonial power’ (and so on and so on), you might be able to spin it out for a whole chapter, possibly even a book. And so justify your job and salary.

But for Wolf-Dieter Dube, writing back in the early 1970s, this entire Armoury of Accusation wasn’t yet available. So, lacking the rhetoric of modern critical theory/moral accusation, Dube fills his text by repeating and amplifying the artists’ own intentions. He takes the artists at their own word in a way which would look terribly naive in a modern critic.

Thus this book includes very generous extracts from the writings, especially the letters, of all the artists mentioned, as well as by eye-witnesses like their art college tutor Fritz Schumacher. These numerous quotes help build up a really strong feeling of what the Expressionists were trying to do and how they felt about it.

The book is based on first-hand evidence and so, although its critical approach may be dated, the numerous quotes remain very relevant today. He quotes enough from each artist that you not only get a sense of their distinctive styles of painting, but of writing and thinking, too.

Art in Wilhelmine Germany

Dube sets the mood of Wilhelmine Germany (i.e. Germany under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II – or ‘Emperor William’ II) at the turn of the century. For a start Germany had only recently been ‘unified’ (in 1871) and its different component parts, the states or Länder, still had very strong regional identities. Cities with good technical schools included Dresden, Cologne, Munich and so on, but Berlin was the only truly metropolitan city. Even Berlin couldn’t match Paris for artistic tradition and glittering cultural production. German art was dominated by a late academic realist style, as taught in all the state art schools.

In the generation before the Expressionists, all the main cities with art schools had experienced ‘secessions’, when artists influenced by Impressionism had found their works rejected by the academies and salons and had set up independent progressive groupings – the Munich Secession in 1892, the Dresden Secession in 1893, the Vienna Secession under Gustav Klimt in 1897, the Berlin Secession in 1898.

Another sign of the times was the number of artists’ colonies which were set up in remote rural locations, starting with Worpswede in the 1890s (whose most lasting member was the woman artist Paula Modersohn-Becker). According to Colin Rhodes’s book on Primitivism, by 1910 there were about 30 artists’ colonies based in remote rural locations around Germany.

And the 1890s had also seen the founding of the German branch of Art Nouveau (known as the Jugendstil) in Munich in 1896. Like parallel movements elsewhere in Europe, the Jugendstil was dedicated to rejecting the accumulation of clutter which had encrusted Victorian furniture and handicrafts, and returning design to simpler, purer lines and more co-ordinated interiors.

As to the French influence, Dube explains how Impressionism came late to Germany, only being gathered and exhibited in a significant amount around the turn of the century. In fact it was almost immediately overtaken by Post-Impressionist works which were much more up to date and were exhibited at about the same time.

Of the Post-Impressionists, Van Gogh and Gauguin were the primary influences on the new young generation of German artists – the former for his emphasis on vibrantly thick brush strokes to convey strong feeling, and the latter a) for his odysseys, first to rural Brittany then to remote Tahiti, in search of the ‘primitive’ and ‘authentic’, and b) for his quest to simplify painting into thick black outlines containing areas of garish colour. And so Dube includes early works by Heckel, Kirchner and so on which are obviously influenced by van Gogh’s thick bright brushstrokes (Brickworks by Erich Heckel, Lake in the Park by Kirchner).

Histories of German Expressionism tend to focus on two main groups, Die Brücke (meaning ‘the bridge’) and Der Blaue Reiter (‘The Blue Rider’). Many artists joined these groups, then left, were simultaneously members of other groupings like the various ‘Secessions’, set up splinter groups, and so on. It was a fluid, fertile scene. But these two groups were the most organised, produced manifestos and held exhibitions, and so are easier to write about.

Origin of the term ‘Expressionism’

The term ‘Expressionism’ itself has about half a dozen possible sources. No one group ever claimed to be Expressionists, the word seems simply to have become current among journalists, critics and reviewers soon after 1910. An exhibition held in Cologne in 1912 referred to ‘the movement known as Expressionism’ and the first academic monograph on the subject was written in 1914, positioning it (inaccurately) as the German equivalent of French Cubism and Italian Futurism – so it was being used by contemporaries by those dates. But it never became the badge of a clearly defined group (unlike Impressionism in France).

What is certain is that the term was only just becoming widely known when the war broke out and art movements all across Europe were decimated.

Die Brücke 1905-13

Die Brücke was formed in Dresden in 1905. The four founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (who was still alive when this book was published). Later members included Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. They considered themselves a ‘bridge’ which would link together all the young artists of their time who were driven by the need to express themselves more forcefully, clearly and purely than academic conventions permitted. As manifestos and interpretations multiplied, they also saw their work as a ‘bridge’ to the more spiritual ‘art of the future’.

The four founder members were all originally architecture students, which explains why they felt free to take liberties with the tradition of figure painting. In their quest for new forms and visions they were all attracted to the technique of woodcut prints, which naturally accentuate stark outlines and sharp contrasts between light and shade.

Nowhere do severity of construction, strength of contrast and an uncompromising emphasis on plane and line find so complete fulfilment as in the woodcut… (p.26)

Their drawing technique was deliberately crude, and colour was garish and unnaturalistic, both devices to emphasise their freedom of expression. Kirchner wanted ‘free drawing from the free human body in the freedom of nature’.

Die Brücke harked back to the German tradition of harsh angular work by Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Typical of their polemical intent was the programme published in 1906 and which Kirchner carved in wood:

Believing in development and in a new generation both of those who create and of those who enjoy, we call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces. (quoted page 21)

Elsewhere they wrote that they belonged to a generation:

who want freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces.

They wanted to apprehend art as ‘intensified, poetic life’ (p.37).

Looked at in the cold light of day, most of the manifestos, letters and other writings of both the Bridge and the Blue Rider seem extremely anodyne (in fact Dube concedes that this is the conventional modern view of them). After a century of impassioned manifestos, proclamations and statements of intent, the Bridge’s writings seem little more than codified excitement about being young and full of confidence in their burning mission to change the world.

The four would-be artists hired an empty butcher’s shop in a working class area of Dresden which they decorated extensively, packing it with paintings, drawings and prints. Nudity of both sexes was common – making it all sound very like a idealistic but scruffy commune from the early 1970s, just when Dube was writing. In summer they frequented the Moritzburg lakes, which features in many of their landscapes and nudes.

Dube devotes separate sections to each of the important Bridge artists – namely, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Pechstein and Mueller – outlining their development over the key years from around 1905 to 1914. He follows them into the maelstrom of the Great War and beyond, with liberal quotes from their writings to help the reader really understand the aims and intentions and developing style of each of them.

Kirchner was the dominant personality and the best artist of the group. In 1913, as the Bridge began to drift apart, Kirchner wrote an account of the history and development of the group which the other three disagreed with so strongly that it precipitated the final break-up. Sic transit gloria iuventae.

Der Blaue Reiter 1911-14

The Blue Rider was slightly later. It was founded in 1909 in Munich by a group of artists who rejected the official art school there. Broader based than the Bridge, its founders included a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, as well as native German artists such as Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. The Blue Rider also lasted till the outbreak of war in 1914.

Kandinsky was the central figure. Some people thought the name derived from an early painting of the same title by Kandinsky, created in 1903, but Kandinsky himself later wrote that it came from Marc’s enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky’s love of riders, combined with a shared love of the colour blue.

Kandinsky was an intensely spiritual person. Indeed it’s one of the ironies of Expressionism that it looks so harsh, angular and repelling to us today (and especially in contrast to the softness of the French tradition — even the garish Fauves eventually led on to the decorativeness of Matisse and Dufy) – and yet all its proponents thought of themselves as highly spiritual visionaries, returning to nature, depicting the human soul, and other essentially gentle, hippy ideals.

For example, for Kandinsky blue was the colour of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal (as he put it in his seminal 1911 book, On the Spiritual in Art). All the other colours had similar spiritual connotations.

The history of the group is complex as it formed after the collapse of a previous group which had itself been created in opposition to the Secession Munich. All that takes a bit of explaining.

But the key point that emerges is that the Blue Rider’s main claim to fame is that its central figure, Kandinsky, was one of the first painters in Europe to push beyond Expressionism into pure painterly abstraction. This seismic event took place in or around 1910.

Certainly the Blue Rider was a large group whose intentions and ability varied from artist to artist. Broadly speaking, they all rejected the realist academic tradition and wanted to create a more spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting.

Their interests ranged from European medieval art to children’s art, to the ‘tribal’ art from Africa and the Pacific which was becoming fashionable in the latter part of the 1900s, and they were all well aware of contemporary developments in Paris – especially of Fauvism (1905) and Cubism (1908).

The Blue Rider group organised two exhibitions – held from December 1911 to January 1912, and from March to April 1912 – that toured Germany.

The Blue Rider almanac

In May 1912 they published an ‘almanac’ which included contemporary, primitive and folk art, along with children’s paintings. It contained reproductions of more than 140 artworks, and 14 major articles. A second edition was planned but never published because of the outbreak of war.

The Blue Ride Almanac is a fascinating record of the ‘turn against the European Tradition’ in the way it was dominated by primitive, folk, and children’s art, with pieces from the South Pacific and Africa, Japanese drawings, medieval German woodcuts and sculpture, Egyptian puppets, Russian folk art, and Bavarian religious art painted on glass.

The five works by Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin were outnumbered by seven from Henri Rousseau and thirteen (!) from child artists.

The group broke up with the advent of war, in which both Franz Marc and August Macke were killed, while Kandinsky was forced to move back to Russia. It had a ghostly post-war existence when Kandinsky, Feininger, Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky were persuaded to form Die Blaue Vier (the Blue Four) group in 1923 as a money-making scheme to exhibit and lecture around the United States from 1924.

The Blue Rider painters one by one

Dube moves systematically through the main Blue Rider painters (Kandinsky, von Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, Auguste Macke, Paul Klee, Heinrich Campendonk, Alfred Kubin) detailing their evolution from their beginnings, through their key contributions to the movement, and into the Great War, explaining the origin and development of their styles, quoting liberally from their letters and diaries.

• Wassily Kandinsky – older (b.1866) Russian, earnest and spiritual, in the late 1900s he moved quickly through Fauvist garishness to achieve the breakthrough into pure abstraction (Cossacks, 1911)
• Alexej von Jawlensky (b.1864) Russian, brilliantly coloured works exhibited in 1905 at the same Salon d’Automne show which gave birth to the term ‘les Fauves’, his portraits of women are popular but the war shocked him out of Expressionism and into semi-abstract religious painting – Saviour’s face, 1919
• Gabriele Münter (b.1877) German – Kandinsky divorced his first wife to marry Münter and they lived in a house in Murnau which became known locally as ‘the Russian house’. She painted woman and landscapes with strong outlines and colours – Jawlensky and Werefkin, 1909
• Franz Marc (b.1880) highly eloquent writer of art theory, and beautiful painter of animals, specially horses, evolving a steadily more abstracted style before his untimely death in 1916 – the Mandrill, 1913
• Auguste Macke (b.1887) younger than Marc with whom he became close friends, Macke was – unusually for this gang – light and unspiritual. He frequently went to Paris, entranced by the experiments in colour of the Fauves and Delauney. He painted light, bright depictions of scenes of real life – Zoological gardens, 1912. Macke was developing quickly towards a lighter more abstract palette when war broke out and he was killed almost immediately, in September 1914.
• Paul Klee (b.1879) from early on Klee had a facility for fine line drawing but found it hard to combine with colour. In 1914 he went on a two-week trip to Tunisia with Macke which has become famous in art history because both artists found it crystallised their styles and helped Klee, in particular, paint in watercolour washes which were to define his mature style – The Föhn Wind in the Marcs’ Garden, 1914. Klee went on to teach at the Bauhaus school.
• Heinrich Campendonk (b.1889) friends with Marc and influenced by his animal paintings, Campendonk went on to develop a decorative, fairy-tale style – Cow, 1914.
• Alfred Kubin (b.1877) A highly-strung Austrian print-maker who developed a grotesque style of illustration based on things he saw under a microscope and is perhaps more appropriately labelled a Symbolist, though he befriended and exhibited with the Blue Riders, before abandoning art altogether to become a writer in the 1920s.

Kandinsky has gone down in history as the most important figure because of his decisive move into complete abstraction – but Marc comes over as the more charismatic and fascinating character. Marc initially devoted himself to studying anatomy in order to do nudes better but, eventually repelled by humans, concentrated for his key four years (1910-1914) on wonderful stylised and colourful paintings of animals.

The Expressionists’ reversal of values

By now (about three-quarters of the way through the book) what is clear is that these two groups – the Bridge and the Blue Rider – taken together, had effected a complete revolution in thinking about art, quite literally reversing the priorities of 400 years of post-Renaissance painting:

Colour is not there to serve the representation of an object, or something material, but the object serves as the starting-point for the arrangement of colours. (p.114)

In the words of Franz Marc, their works were seeking:

the completely spiritualised, de-materialised inwardness of perception which our fathers, the artists of the nineteenth century, never even tried to achieve in their ‘pictures’. (quoted page 125)

Released from nature, colour is able to radiate its essence for, as Herwarth Walden put it:

Art is the gift of something new, not the reproduction of something already in existence. (quoted page 155)

As the preface to the third exhibition of the Neue Sezession, held in Berlin in spring 1911 put it:

Each and every object is only the channel of a colour, a colour composition, and the work as a whole aims, not at an impression of nature, but at the expression of feelings. (quoted page 159)

Or as Marc put it:

We no longer cling to reproductions of nature, but destroy it so as to reveal the mighty laws which hold sway beneath the beautiful exterior. (Marc, 1912, quoted p.132)

It comes as a surprise to learn that Marc’s very last paintings abandoned the subject altogether and became completely abstract exercises in vibrant colour and form. He was hard on Kandinsky’s footsteps and who knows where he would have gone next. But he had barely started when he was called up, then killed in the war. Which is why history remembers Kandinsky as the great pioneer of abstract art.

Berlin and Vienna

By this stage, 150 pages into the text, I felt overflowing with words, pictures and ideas. But there’s more! The book continues with a final fifty pages or so exploring other contemporary painters of Berlin and Vienna who were working in the same style, devoting four or five pages to an overview of the artistic scenes in those cities before going on to consider the individual works of:

• Max Beckmann (b.1884) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer, Beckmann experimented with a late realistic style influenced by Munch (who met and advised him) until the war came and the experience of horror and murder led to a nervous breakdown in 1915, after which Beckmann completely rejected his earlier work and went on to perfect a style of highly figurative, angular caricatures, becoming part of the post-war taste for the grotesque. – The Night, 1918
• Lyonel Feininger (b.1871) German, had a successful career as a political cartoonist, but during the later 1900s developed a sort of shimmering semi-Futurist way of depicting natural scenes, using ‘crystalline or prismatic construction’. – Bicycle race, 1912 He went on to work at the Bauhaus school.
• Ernst Barlach (b.1870) German, part of the new generation, Barlach however rejected the move to the abstract, and produced prints and sculptures of stylised but essentially natural figures, mostly of a religious nature. – The Cathedrals, 1922
• Ludwig Meidner (b.1884) German, Meidner was a prolific writer who studied in Berlin, then Paris, scraped a living by writing and painting until, at age 18 in 1912, he suddenly began expressing himself in vivid and violent religious visions. – Apocalyptic landscape, 1913.
• Oskar Kokoschka (b.1886) Austrian artist, poet and playwright, a major figure whose physical pain and psychological unrest drove him through a series of styles. Most famous is the swirling angularity of a work like The Bride of the Wind, painted just before the war – note the nervously clenched hands of the male figure.
• Egon Schiele (b.1890) staggeringly gifted figurative painter and draughtsman who developed a distinctive style depicting angular, naked or half-clothed bodies, reminiscent in the use of decorative mosaic-style detailing of his mentor Gustav Klimt, except Schiele removed all the gold and luxury from the designs, austerely emptying them out into starker elements surrounding and threatening his subjects. Schiele caused scandal with his nudes but was also widely recognised in Vienna and Germany. – Embrace, 1917, Self portrait

The Great War killed off Expressionism as a movement (not least by killing some of the most promising Expressionist painters). Germany lost the war and in short order saw the abdication of the Kaiser, the end of the Empire and street fighting in Berlin and Munich as Communists tried to declare a revolution. These disturbances were brutally crushed by right-wing militias and then the Weimar Republic settled into an uneasy, bitter and disillusioned peace.

In this context, long-haired artists going off to remote communes to paint sensitive nudes amid nature seemed like sentimental hogwash. The Dada manifesto of 1918 mocked Expressionism for being hopelessly out of date. Artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz painted bitter pictures of post-war poverty, corruption and prostitution, the Weimar Germany of Brecht and Weill’s bitter satires.

In 1925 an exhibition was staged of the new satirical artists with the name Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and this became the slogan of the new generation.

Summary

Although old-fashioned in tone and approach, this is a really informative book, made extra valuable by the extensive quotes from the artists themselves, their friends and lovers, contemporary critics and writers – a collage of quotations which conveys a really powerful sense of the artists, their time and place, and their determination to create something really new and enduring. Which they did.

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Related links

• The Expressionists on Amazon
• Expressionism Wikipedia article
• The Bridge Wikipedia article
• The Blue Rider Wikipedia article

Related reviews

• Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984)
• Fauvism by Sarah Whitfield (1991)
• Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting (1993)
• Marc by Susanna Partsch (1991)