Expressionism

Question 1

Brucke Group/General Feel

Answer 1

Brucke (Bridge), Dresden: Kirchner, Heckel, Pechstein, Emil Nolde, manifesto - looking towards a movement based on youth, immediacy, authenticity, liberty, anti-conventional. Life drawing, organic forms of expression, looking at modern art, Munch; art-nouveau, primitivism.
Kirchner self portrait with model typifies the expressionist style, looks effortless but worked on for over ten years, display of verility and attitude of group. Lover dodo. Communal life, bohemian, rejection of all conventional life, creating an alternative culture.
Started off as art students, very young, not official in the art world. 1906.
-Strong colours, fierce brush strokes, simplified forms, nudity, supposedly closer to being free/youthful attempt at emancipating the body and people from gender politics and conventions.
Perspective abstract, intense, absence of horizon and composition very busy/unforgiving.
Focus on sensual experience and intense subjectivity.
Gesamkunstwerk and ‘inner necessity’ important.

Question 2

Influences

Answer 2

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, most popular book taken into the first world war by soldiers. Brucke, bridge concept from Nietzche, about men being like a bridge to a better future.
Primitivism
Symbolism
Grunewald, ‘The Isenheim Altarpiece’, very important historical German painting of the era

Question 3

Woodcut

Answer 3

German expressionists revived the woodcut, drawing on the history of german woodcut, reviving it in a fresh new way.
Emil Nolde creating violent, tactile woodcuts, primitive and rough/spontaneity, authenticity, feeling of effortlessness.
Very primitive and abstracted, drawing from african art.

Question 4

Kirchner

Answer 4

Women in the Street: depicted like high-fashion mannequins, animalistic, cold, like crows, created brush strokes that resemble the wood cut, mediums over lapping, claustrophobic atmosphere.
Men queuing behind the women, prostitutes? moved to Berlin.
Greatly impacted by the war, suffered from PTSD and depicts himself as a soldier with a severed hand (portrait from before, lost his spark)

Question 5

Der Blaue Reiter - The Blue Rider Group

Answer 5

The Blue Rider Group: Munich
Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc
more interested in colour theory, abstraction, relationship between the arts, decorative and aesthetic.
Concerned with the spirituality of art.

Question 6

Kandinsky

Answer 6

Interested in the relationship between art and sound
Deemed blue as the most spiritual colour
Synesthesic
Very abstracted work, with a lot of symbolism and suggestions of atmosphere and feeling, about the spirituality of the work.
May be slight colonial influences, child-like naive forms
Apocolyptic, fantastical atmosphere to work

Question 7

Later Years

Answer 7

Later expressionists adopted a more sartirical and political angle on art and expressionism, with the war creating disillusionment and stunting inspiration, expressionism was used to express underlying qualms with society, just as it had been before but in a more outward, obvious manner. Artists such as Max Beckham and Otto Dix were part of this movement (Nazi looted art)