German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brucke

All art is 'expressive' and we are continuously expressing ourselves in word, body language, gesture, clothes we wear and in what we do.  But Expressionism as a term was originally used to describe those artists who, in their work, reacted against art that set out to describe the natural world e.g. Naturalism and in particular the dominant form of this art at the turn of the century was Impressionism.  Expressionist artists wished to give tangible form to some of the intangible aspects of human life such as the emotions, intuition, spirituality, desires and fear (angst in German) rather than representing the world of appearances. Expressionist artists recreated the world using the heart and the intellect.  There is endless debate about who first coined the term and whether it can be applied only to German art or can include the work of French artists, such as the Fauves, who were motivated by the same subjective tendencies. For instance the term expressionism was used in the catalogue for the 22nd Berlin Secession exhibition of April 1911 to describe the work of Braque, Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck and Marquet. 

However, it can be argued that the root of all of these developments lies in Post-Impressionism, especially in the work of Gauguin and Van Gogh.  In Germany after the catastrophic experience of the First World War, Expressionist forms and techniques became dominant in all of the arts (including painting, graphic design, theatre, cinema and architecture) this was especially the case in the short lived Weimar republic and for this reason Expressionism is most commonly identified with German art of the twentieth century.

In painting there are many individual names associated with German expressionism, these are given below together with a list of the most active members of the two major collaborative groups of expressionist artists Die Brucke (the Bridge) and members of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

The Die Brucke Group (Dresden 1905- 1913)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner                      1880 - 1938

Karl Schmidt-Rottluf                          1884 - 1976

Erich Heckel                                      1883 - 1970

Fritz Bley                                            1880 - 1966

Emile Nolde                                       1867 - 1956

Max Pechstein                                   1881 - 1955

Otto Mueller                                        1874 - 1930

Christian Rohlfs                                 1849 - 1938

Der Blaue Reiter          (Munich 1911 - 1913 )

Wassily Kandinsky                            1866 - 1944

Franz Marc                                         1880 - 1916

Paul Klee                                           1879 - 1940

Auguste Macke                                 1887 - 1914

Alexej von Jawlensky                        1864 - 1941

Gabriele Munter                                1877 - 1962

Associated artists:

Lyonel Feininger                               1871 - 1956

Max Beckmann                                 1884 - 1950

George Grosz                                   1893 - 1959

Otto Dix                                              1891 - 1969

Ludwig Meidner                                1884 - 1966

Oskar Kokoschka                             1886 - 1980

Paula Modersohn-Becker                1876 - 1907

Kathe Kollwitz                                    1867 - 1945

Marianne von Werefkin                     1860 - 1938

Heinrich Campendonk                      1889 - 1957

Sculptor: Ernst Barlach                   1870 - 1938

Architects:

Erich Mendelsohn                              1887 - 1953

Hans Poelzig                                      1869 - 1936

Bruno Taut                                          1880 - 1938

Cinema:

‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’              1919

Dir. Robert Wiene

See also:

Edvard Munch                                    1863 - 1944

James Ensor                                      1860 - 1949

Chaim Soutine                                   1893 - 1943

Georges Rouault                                1871 - 1950

 “I am returning to the ideas I had in the country before I knew the Impressionists and should not be surprised if the Impressionists soon find fault with my way of doing things, which have been more fertilised by the ideas of Delacroix than by theirs. For instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily in order to express myself more powerfully. But let us leave these things and theory aside for a moment, I am going to give you an example of what I mean.

“I would like to paint the portrait of an artist friend who dreams great dreams, who works like a nightingale sings, because that is his nature. This man will be blond. I want to put into this picture my appreciation, the love that I have for him. I will paint him then, to begin with, as faithfully as I can; but the painting is not finished this way. To finish I have to become an arbitrary colourist. I exaggerate the blond of the hair and get orange tones, chromes, pale yellow. Behind the head, instead of painting the banal wall of an ordinary apartment, I paint infinity. I make a simple background of the richest, the most intense blue that I can Compound, and through this simple combination of an illuminated blond head on a rich blue background I get the effect as mysterious as a star shining in deep azure skies."

Vincent Van Gogh

“Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism and the rest have nothing in common with our German people. For these concepts are neither old or modern, but are only the artifactitious stammerings of people to whom God has denied the grace of genuine artistic talent and given instead the gift of jabbering or deception......

I have observed among the pictures here, quite a few paintings which make one actually come to the conclusion that the eye shows things differently to certain human beings than the way they really are, that is that there really are men who see the present population of our nation only as rotten cretins; who, on principle, see meadows blue, skies green, clouds sulphur yellow, and so on, or, as they say, experience them as such. I do not want to enter into an argument here about the question of whether the persons concerned really do or do not see or feel in such a way; but in the name of the German people, I want to forbid these pitiful misfortunates who quite obviously suffer from an eye disease, to try to foist these products of their misinterpretations upon the age we live in , or even wish to present them as 'Art' ”.

Adolf Hitler, Speech inaugurating the Great Exhibition of German Art, Munich, 1938

German Expressionism - a short chronology:

1901              Kandinsky founds the New Phalanx with Jawlensky

1904             Kirchner sees the magazine Pan illustrated by Felix Valloton, Munch, Toulouse Lautrec, Signac and Cross

Kirchner visits ethnography museums

1904               Neo Impressionist exhibition in Munich seen by Kirchner

1905              Kandinsky and Jawlensky exhibit in the Salon d'Automne in a Russian room organised by Sergei Diaghilev

1906-7           Kandinsky in Paris

Nolde invited to join Die Brucke

Jawlensky exhibits in the Blue rose exhibition in St Petersburg

Ist Die Brucke exhibition in the sample room of electric lamp factory Dresden

1907              Second Die Brucke exhibition, Richter Gallery, Dresden, causes a
                       scandal.          

                       Kirchner publishes a manifesto of Die Brucke in the form of a woodcut

1907             ‘Believing as we do in evolution, in a new generation of creators and enjoyers of art, we appeal to the young and being the bearers of the future, we desire to win from our comfortably established elders freedom to act and live. Anyone who expresses his creative impulse directly and honestly is one of us'

Schmidt Rotluff spends the summer painting at Oldenburg, N. Germany

1908               Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter spend the summer painting in Murnau

Kandinsky meets Wilhelm Worringer the author of Abstraction and Empathy (1908 published 1912)

1910               Final exhibition of the Die Brucke group in the Arnold Gallery, Dresden. Die Brucke artists move, one by one,  to Berlin which influences a change of style to include urban subjects and images of city life.

1911              Berlin Secession exhibition includes the work of Braque, Derain, Van Dongen, Dufy, Friesz, Manguin, Picasso and Vlaminck. The catalogue for the exhibition labels them as 'Expressionists'

8 December Marc and Kandinsky organise an exhibition of the Blue Rider Group which toured to the Sturm Gallery run by Herbert Walden (Jan, 1912) artists included Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, Munter, Douannier rousseau, Robert Delaunay.

1912             Kandinsky and Marc publish The Blue Rider Almanac

1913             Kirchner publishes the Chronical of the Die Brucke group

1917              Revolution in Germany. The Spartacists led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemberg emerge as the most extreme of left wing groups.

Expressionism as the most radical art becomes the official art of the revolution and later of the Weimar Republic.

1920's          Neue sachlickeit - the 'New Sobriety' or 'New Objectivity' - Grosz,  

                      Beckmann, Dix

1933              Hitler comes to power.

1937            Entartete Kunst 'Degenerate Art' exhibition and House of German Art, Munich