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

Strong erotic performance 'Rite of Spring' by Stravinsky and Diaghilev

Shock Performance in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Paris!

‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ (The Rite of Spring) - Igor Stravinsky, 1913

Igor Stravinsky: ‘At the performance mild protests against the music could be heard from the beginning. Then, when the curtain opened, a group of knock-kneed and long- braided Lolitas jumping up and down (Danse des adolescents), the storm broke. Cries of “ta gueule” came from behind me. I left the hall in a rage. (I was sitting on the right near the orchestra, and I remember slamming the door.) I have never again been that angry. The music was so familiar to me’, I loved it and I couldn’t understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance. I arrived backstage in a fury. There I saw Diaghilev switching the house lights on and off in the hope that this might quiet the hall. For the rest of the performance I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky holding the tails of his frac, while he stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers, like a coxswain.’

Diaghilev

‘I was guided by no system whatever in Le Sacre du Printemps. When I think of the music of the other composers of that time who interest me-Berg’s music, which is synthetic (in the best sense) and Webern’s, which is analytic-how much more theoretical it seems than Le Sacre. And these composers belonged to and supported by a great tradition. Very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du Printemps, however, and not theory. I had only my ear to help me; I heard and wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed...’

Quoted by Stravinsky some years after the first performance in 1913..

“..that the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps was attended by a scandal must be known to everybody. I was unprepared for the explosion myself. The reactions of the musicians who came to the orchestra rehearsals betrayed no intimation of it. (Debussy, who might well have been upset by Le Sacre, was, in fact, much more upset by the success of it a year later.) Nor did the stage spectacle seem likely to precipitate a riot. The dancers had been rehearsing for months; they new what they were doing, at least even though what they were doing often had nothing to do with the music. (“ I will count to forty while you play,” Nijinsky would say to me, “and we will see where we come out.” He couldn’t understand that though we might at some point “come out” together, this did not mean we had been together on the way. The dancers followed Nijinsky’s count; he spoke Russian, of course, and as Russian numbers above ten are polysyllabic-eighteen, for example, vosemnadsat-is in the fast tempo movement neither he nor they could keep up.)

Below, Leon Bakst costume designs for the performance, Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ is often seen as a ‘sonic’ version of the 1907 painting of Picasso ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ Right. They both certainly created shocking new forms in both music and painting that ushered in the Twentieth Century. Both works retain a strong erotic charge.

Artists and designers who worked with Diaghilev on other productions are Bakst, Benois, Braque, Gontcharova, Picasso, Dali, Bilibin, Tchelitchev, and Utrillo.

Study Notes: Cubism

Non-Cubists

Pablo Picasso 1881 - 1975

Georges Braque 1882 - 1963

Juan Gris 1887 - 1927

Cubist: Section D’Or Group

Albert Gleizes         1881 - 1953
Jean Metzinger       1883 - 1956
Henri Laurens         1885 - 1954
Jacques Villon        1875 - 1963

Louis Marcoussis 1878 - 1941

Robert Delaunay 1885 - 1941
Fernand Leger 1881 - 1955

Jacques Lipchitz 1891 - 1973

The term ‘Cubism’ was invented by the critic Louis Vauxcelles. Reviewing an exhibition of the work of Georges Braque held at Kahnweiler's gallery in Paris in 1908 for the magazine ‘Gil Blas’ he wrote, 'Braque reduces everything, sites, figures, houses, to geometric out-lines, to cubes'

As with many of the terms of art history the word cubism does not reflect Braque's real concerns. It was not his intention to reduce the world to cubes but to re-evaluate some of the major aesthetic and representational problems of his time such as the issue of reality and illusion and the use of signs and symbols. Certainly, the outcome of the work of Braque and Picasso between the year’s 1906 -1914 (what is now known as Cubism) was the greatest revolution in the visual arts since the Renaissance. There are more similarities between a painting by Renoir of 1880 and a painting of the Renaissance 300 years earlier than with a Picasso of 1910 painted just 30 years later.

The history of cubism can be divided into three stages:

1 Experimental period 1906 - 1909

2 Analytical Cubism 1909 - 1912

3 Synthetic Cubism 1913 - 1914

By 1910 there was a fully developed 'school' of cubist painting in Paris and the new ideas became widespread, especially in Russia and Italy. Even though the outbreak of the First World War dispersed the artists, the influences lasted until 1925 and became generally manifest in the design known as Art Deco before other aesthetic, especially Surrealism, influences took over.

However, Cubism did not represent a complete break with the western tradition of painting but radically developed it by incorporating cultural references from a variety of sources, Picasso and Braque developed a new way of representing the world. The most important of these cultural references include the formal language of Iberian (ancient Spanish) and African sculpture; the work of El Greco; the Symbolist work of Gauguin- especially his relief carvings; naive art particularly that of Henri (the Douanier) Rousseau and especially the work of Cezanne which was highlighted in a number of major exhibitions in the early years of the C20th.

African art, introduced to Picasso by Andre Derain, offered the example of a direct and forceful expression of ideas in a non naturalistic and ‘conceptual’ way. For example, instead of describing an eye as it appears in a figure, African artists found the most direct visual sign to represent it to the viewer. The direct and powerful solutions vary greatly from sculpture to sculpture and offered to Picasso a whole range of expressive alternatives. As with the work of naive painters such as Rousseau the idea of, say, a tree was made more direct through a simplification of the means used, nothing that is not essential to the representation of the idea of the thing is included in the image.

All of these influences were manifested in a painting by Picasso of 1907 – ‘The Demoiselles d'Avignon’. Although not seen in public until 1916 it had a profound effect on other artists who saw it in Picasso's studio. Braque considered it the work of someone 'swallowing petrol and spitting fire' and responded to its primitivism by painting similar figures of his own marking the beginnings of Cubism.

During the following years the formal innovations of Cezanne became the dominant influence. The cubists continued to investigate problems of representation in painting posed by Cezanne such as how to resolve real space to the surface of the canvas and, with the rejection of Renaissance spatial systems, how to record the sensations of experience in painting. Already Cezanne had to 'deform' nature to create an image with the formal strength of the art of the past. In many of his works, rather than a single perspective on a figure or object he was developing a more dynamic imagery incorporating more than one perspective of the same object into his work and flattening forms towards the painting surface.

Although it was not Cezanne's intention, the cubists developed these formal and perceptual issues by recording many aspects of an object into one image as if moving fully around it, simultaneously representing many ideas and aspects of it. This lead to images which are characterised by a fragmented, planar surface which recorded less and less of the characteristics of the objects depicted and more and more of the abstract language of pictorial form in a style that has become known as ‘Analytical Cubism’.

In analytical cubism the image becomes so fragmented that any figure becomes all but lost in a naturalistic way. However, Picasso and Braque had no ideas of developing an abstract art and soon felt the need to reintroduce the tangible characteristics of objects such as colour and form to re-establish their identity. To do this after the period of analytical cubism required a new treatment of the subject. This took the form of introducing aspects of the objects as 'planes of information'. Braque had trained as a house painter and initially the new information took the form of such effects as wood-graining.

But, by 1912 in the work ‘Still Life with Chair Caning’ Picasso had introduced a piece of commercially printed paper representing chair caning and the oval composition was framed with a piece of real rope - the art of collage had been born. This work was followed by drawings which had pieces of newspaper or printed material incorporated into them to stand for objects themselves or as spatial planes which created a narrative around the ordinary objects of café life by analogy and association and including ambiguity and wit. Instead of 'taking reality apart' Braque and Picasso began to assemble images of objects from different sensory information - hence the work of this period is usually termed ‘Synthetic Cubism’.

The new spatial effects of cubism led to the art object being considered as a real object in its own right. The lack of ‘illusionistic’ recession into the canvas led increasingly to a space that began to visually and actually project into the space of the viewer. The work of art became constructed on and away from the picture plane. These innovations spread throughout Western Europe and were adopted by artists with many different ideas. In the Netherlands, through the influence of Mondrian who had been living in Paris during the cubist years, they lead to the development of an abstract art of coloured geometric planes known as Neo-plasticism and the design movement known as De Stijl; In Russia cubist ideas were adopted by the Constructivists; In Italy they were incorporated into the formal vocabulary of the Futurists, and the influence is present in the work of the young generation of English artists associated with Vorticism; it also affected the work of the German Expressionists

The influence is so widespread that the movement can be considered a major watershed in western European art. Many artists spent the twentieth century attempting to sweat out Cubism and it is it is possible to talk of a pre- and post- cubist pictorial space.

‘The Bateau Lavoir’ – ‘The Laundry Boat’, 1905, Monmartre, Paris, the studio’s where Picasso , Modigliani and others created modern painting.

Picasso Quotes:

“Accidents, try to change them it's impossible. The accidental reveals man."

“Action is the foundational key to all success."

“An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought."

“Art is a lie that makes us realize ze truth."

Study Notes: Fauvism

Art Theory in the 20th Century
ZangTumbTuumb.blogspot.com

Henri Matisse 1869 - 1954

Georges Braque 1882 - 1963

Henri Charles Manguin 1874 - 1945

Andre Derain 1880 - 1954

Maurice Vlaminck 1876 - 1958

Emile Othon Friesz 1879 - 1949

Raoul Dufy 1877 - 1953

Jean Puy 1876 - 1960

Kees van Dongen 1877 - 1968

Charles Camoin 1879 - 1965

Loius Valtat 1869 - 1952

Albert Marquet 1875 - 1947

The term Fauves means 'wild beasts' in French and was used by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles as a disparaging remark about the vivid and turbulent paintings that the group of artists listed above exhibited in the Salon d'Autumn of 1905. The group, centred around Matisse who was on the hanging committee, were given a room to themselves. In the same room were exhibited some portrait busts in the Renaissance Style by the sculptor Albert Marquet. On seeing the busts Vauxcelles exclaimed ' Donatello chez les Fauves' (Donatello amongst the wild beasts and by implication 'Daniel in the lion's den') from which time the name caught on and became generally applied.

Fauvism as a movement had a short life from 1905 to 1907. Its origins and concerns can be traced back to the work of the Post Impressionists. There is much diversity of temperament among the various artists associated with Fauvism but all of the work is characterised by an anti-academic attitude and was generally considered at the time to be anarchistic. Fauve painting generally retains ordinary perspective without deliberate distortion - the subjects can be easily recognised. However, the Fauve attitude to colour was revolutionary in that it was not used naturalistically as local colour with chiaroscuro to describe form but at its most intense saturation in an 'orchestration' of extreme contrasts. The impulse for this use of colour comes on the one hand from experience of the brilliant light of the south of France but also from the desire to use colour for its own sake as an expressive element within painting.

Some quotes:

"I used to go to work right out in the sunshine; the sky was blue, the wheat fields seemed to be stirring and trembling in the torrid heat, with hues of yellow covering the whole scale of chromes; they quivered as if they were about to go up in flames. Vermillion alone would render the brilliant red of the roofs on the hillside across the river. The orange of the soil, the raw, harsh colours of the walls and grass, the ultramarine and cobalt of the sky harmonised to extravagance at a sensual musical pitch. Only the colours on my canvas, orchestrated to the limit of their power and resonance could render the colour emotions of that landscape".

Maurice Vlaminck

"I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture....to paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colours suit this season, I will be inspired only by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves. My sensation itself may vary, the autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer, or quite cool with a cold sky and lemon yellow trees that give a chilly impression and announce winter... I want to reach that condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture. What I am after most of all is expression.....the purpose of a painter must not be conceived as separate from his pictorial means, and these pictorial means must be the more complete (I do not mean the more complicated) the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

“Expression for me, does not reside in the passions mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's disposal to express his feelings....Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety...There is a necessary proportion of tones that may lead one to change the shape of a figure or transform a composition.

If upon a white canvas I jot down some sensations of blue, of green, of red - every new brush stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I set out to paint an interior: I have before me a cupboard; it gives me a sensation of bright red - I put down the red which satisfies me; immediately a relation is established between this red and the white of the canvas.

If I put a green near the red, if I paint in a yellow floor, there must still be between this green, this yellow and the white of the canvas a relation that will be satisfactory to me. But these several tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary, therefore, that the various elements that I use be so balanced that they do not destroy one another. To do this I must organise my ideas; the relation between tones must be so established that they will sustain one another. A new combination of colours will succeed the first one and will give more completely my interpretation. I am forced to transpose until finally my picture may seem completely changed when, after successive modifications the red has succeeded the green as the dominant colour. I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. When I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike that of a musical composition.

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair to rest from physical fatigue.”

Henri Matisse ‘Notes of a Painter’ 1908

Modern Art - Artists Quotes

Cubism? There is no such thing as Cubism..

Picasso, non-Cubist painter

A man’s life is his work; his work is his life.

Jackson Pollock, painter, (Abstract Expressionism)

Speaking to a lawyer about pictures, is something like talking to a butcher about humanity.

John Constable, painter, 1824

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

Frank Stella, painter, (Minimalism)

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Clement Greenberg, American art critic, (Abstract Expressionism)

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Philip Johnson, visionary architect, New York Times, 1964

Don’t imagine that ‘Art’ is something that is designed to give a gentle uplift and self confidence. Art is not a brassiere, at least not in the English sense. But then again don’t forget that brassiere is the French for ‘life jacket’.

Julian Barnes, writer, ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’

Artists who approach perfection, don’t have many ideas.

Odilon Redon, painter, ‘To Myself: Journal’ (Symbolism)

The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator’s mind.

Kakuzo Okakura, ‘The Book of Tea’

Painting, isn’t so difficult when you don’t know…but when you do…it’s quite a different matter.

Edgar Degas, painter, (Impressionism)

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

Frank Stella, The Studio, (Minimalism)

Only bad painters enjoy painting.

Cecil Collins, painter, Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1989

In painting, you have to destroy in order to gain…you have got to sacrifice something you are quite pleased with in order to get something better. Of course, it’s a bit of a risk..

Graham Sutherland, painter, 1954 (Neo-Romanticism)

A mature artist is at the same time aware of the futility of his achievement and of the validity of his pursuit.

Jean Helion, painter

An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.

Francis Bacon, painter

All artists are Anarchists.

George Bernard Shaw, writer,

I have lived enough among painters and around studios to have had all the theories-and how contradictory they are-rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

DH Lawrence, writer, Assorted Articles

You can look at a painting for a whole week and then never think about it again. You can look at a painting for a second and think about it for the rest of your life.

Joan Miro, painter, (Surrealism)

The airless studios grow stifling. Kick open the door-the hum of life turns into a roar.

Feliks Topolski, BBC Third Programme, 1946

Think of the musical role colour will hence fourth play in modern painting, colour which vibrates just like music, is able to attain what is most general and yet so elusive in nature-namely inner force.

Paul Gauguin, 1899, (Post Impressionism)

It is through…Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

Oscar Wilde, writer,

There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.

Ernst Gombrich, writer, The Story of Art

I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.

Bill Viola, contemporary video artist

Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of, but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.

Henri Matisse, painter

Modern Art - Artists Quotes 1900

What is the modern conception of pure art? Creating a suggestive magic containing both the subject and the object, the world around the artist, and the artist himself.

Baudelaire, poet/writer,

What I should like to write is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style.

Gustave Flaubert, writer, 1852

The close of the past century was full of a strange desire to get out of form…I now feel the impulse to create form.

W.B Yeats, writer, 1903

It was-truly-like an opening world

Ford Maddox Ford, painter, on the years before 1914

I must tell you as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature, but with me the realisation of my sensations is almost painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I do not have the magnificent richness of colouring that animates Nature. Here on the bank of the river the motifs fly…

Cezanne 1906, a few weeks before he dies (Impressionism)

I had shown two studies by Cezanne to a client. And right away he said: ‘Don’t want any of those things with all the empty spaces..’

Ambroise Vollard, highly influential Parisian art dealer, art publisher

We now come to the most stupefying room of this salon which is already rich in sources of astonishment. Here, any description, any account, like any comment, all become impossible, as what we are shown here has-aside from the materials used-no relation to painting whatsoever; Here we find nothing more than formless coloured streaks and dabs; blue, red yellow, green, stains of colour juxtaposed any which way, the crude and naïve games of a child who is experimenting with a box of coloured pencils or paints that he has been given as a present.

A review of the Fauves room at the Salons des Refuses, by ‘Journal de Rouen’, 20^th November 1905, (treasured by Vlaminck)

What I couldn’t do in life, except by throwing a bomb-which would have led me to the scaffold-I have tried to achieve in art, by using pure colour to a maximum.

Maurice de Vlaminck, painter, (Fauvism)

If I write it is to infuriate my fellow: to get talked about and make a name for myself. When one has a name, one has success with women and in business

Arthur Craven, ex-boxer and raconteur, c.1907

On African tribal wood carvings:

Abstract art properly defined, is drawn from nature, an abstract of nature…it could thus be made to apply to all that large field of art which lie beneath the non-representational and the naturalistic-a field of which includes almost all African art.

William Fagg/Margaret Plass, African sculpture: An Anthology

On Cubism: Let the picture imitate nothing and let it present nakedly its raison d’etre’.

Metzinger and Gleizes, 1912, (Cubism)

Cubism? There is no such thing as Cubism..

Picasso, non-Cubist painter

Some might be tempted to think I have something against Cubism. Not at all: I prefer the eccentricities of even a banal mind to the boring, predictable work of a bourgeois imbecile.

Arthur Craven, ‘Oscar Wilde’s nephew’

The function of Art is to disturb. Science re-assures.

Georges Braque, painter, Sketchbook, 1948

I want nothing but emotion given off (by the painting)…There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality.

Picasso

Painting is stronger than I am, it can make me do whatever it wants.

Picasso, a note written in the back of one of his sketchbooks

When discussing his often difficult relationship with Picasso during the Cubist period:

..It was a little like rope-work in mountain climbing..

Georges Braque, ‘not Madame Picasso’

For a portrait to be a work of art, it must not resemble the sitter…the painter has within himself the landscapes he wishes to produce. To depict a figure, one must not paint that figure; one must paint its atmosphere.

Umberto Boccioni, Technical Manifesto of Futurist painting, 1910

War camouflage was the work of the cubists: it was also, if you like, their revenge.

Jean Paulhan, writer

On the outbreak of World War I: On that day, lightening struck the hearts of men

Joseph Delteil, writer

Picasso was the first person to produce figurative paintings which overturned the rules of appearance; he suggested appearance without using the usual codes, without respecting the representational truth of form, but using a breath of irrationality instead, to make representation stronger and more direct; so that form could pass directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain.

Francis Bacon, painter, discussing his influences in the 1960’s

What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.

Amedeo Modigliani

Seek the strongest color effect possible..the content is of no importance.

Henri Matisse, painter, (Fauvism)

Art cannot be modern.. Art is primordially eternal.

Egon Schiele, painter (Vienna Succession with Gustave Klimt)

Zang Tumb Tuumb!..