Expressionism: What It Is And Characteristics Of This Artistic Movement
In June 1905, the same year that the first Fauvist exhibition broke the schemes of the French bourgeoisie, a group of students from Dresden came together in a radical act of protest against society. This vanguard called itself Die Brücke (The Bridge), the first large group (and, possibly, the only truly cohesive) of the movement that received the name of expressionism.
Die Brücke It brought together what, later, would be the most representative artists of expressionism, especially German. Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Karl Schimdt-Rottluf and, above all, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, to whom other illustrious names would later be added such as Max Hermann Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Otto Müller and Kees van Dongen. The latter, despite being strictly Fauvist, belonged to the group for a year as an honorary member.
Who were these rebellious artists who exaltedly protested against the deep contradictions of pre-war society? We find out below.
The roots of expressionism can be traced many years before the creation of Die Brücke. In fact, we can speak of expressionism many centuries earlier, if we take the work of El Greco (1541-1614), for example, or of Matthias Grünewald (1475/80-1528), whose painting was, by the way, greatly admired by the expressionists of the 20th. But perhaps the great predecessor of dark expressionism was Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) who, with his painful and anguished black paintings, was a hundred years ahead of the emergence of the “canonical” movement.
According to Mario de Micheli in his extraordinary book The Avant-garde of the 20th century, it seems that it was Pechstein (1881-1955) who first used the term “expressionist” to refer to one of his works. According to this story, the Berlin Secession jury asked if the style of his paintings could still be called Impressionism, to which Pechstein replied no, that “it was expressionism.”
There are, however, some discrepancies, since apparently Paul Cassirier, a Berliner who was dedicated to the trade in artistic objects, had previously called the engravings of Edvard Munch (1863-1944) that way. General art history places Munch precisely as the “father” of expressionism at the end of the century, although in reality the artist never belonged to the group, although he played the role of friend and protector. Something similar to what Édouard Manet was for the impressionists.
A cry for freedom in the artistic world
We have spoken of expressionism at the end of the century as “canonical” expressionism, but, in reality, what are we referring to? Well, unlike other avant-garde movements such as cubism or surrealism, which are quite cohesive and defined, expressionism is a kind of “catch-all” where artists of diverse and varied expression are included.
It is not the same to talk about Kandinsky, one of the founders of the other great expressionist group, The Blue Reiter (The Blue Horseman), which by George Grosz (1893-1959). While the works of the former are filled with a color inherited directly from the Fauves and quickly approach abstract painting, the disturbing and dark work of the latter provokes a certain “rejection”, by presenting a dark society full of beings that resemble to puppets or puppets.
This is precisely the reason for expressionism; is about a forceful protest, a cry (a scream, rather) that, like the one that resonates in the famous canvas of Edvard Munch, the great guide and teacher, expands throughout the world and disrupts its foundations.
Expressionism is the child of a very specific era. At the end of the 19th century, the first voices emerged to speak out against the prevailing violent positivism, among which the expressionists were included. In other words, expressionism is opposed to science and progress. A science and progress that, by the way, is what will end up leading humanity to the bloody First World War, the great tragedy of the first avant-garde.
It is also important to remember that the most remembered expressionist movement, the one that took place in Germany and, specifically, in the cities of Munich (The Blue Reiter) and Dresden and Berlin (Die Brücke), It is partly a result of the aggressive Pan-German policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II which, after all, contributed, and not a little, to the outbreak of the First World War. And if we understand that the expressionists felt rejection towards all that “German dream”, we also understand why the Nazis, some decades later, labeled expressionist art as “degenerate art”.
Madness, naivety, instinct
Precisely because of their exacerbated “anti-positivism” and the disenchantment they feel towards the world in which they have had to live, expressionists take as reference nihilist authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and, in general, adopt many of the bases of the German Romanticism. The expressionist world is a dreamlike and dark world, full of fantasy and terror, where madness and the expression of the most primary instincts obtain a predominant place. If what needs to be attacked is the bourgeois society of this decadent world, the best way to do it is to put before its nose everything that, in its hypocrisy, it detests: sex, violence, mental alienation.
Alfred Kublin (1877-1959), one of the collaborators of The Blue Reiter, is especially known for his fantastical illustrations, inspired by the gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe or ETA Hoffmann. His artistic corpus exudes darkness in an intense way; In this case, Kublin’s personal life had a lot to do with it, since it is known that he had a complicated childhood with a very strict father and that, as a child, he mutilated small animals.
If what interested the expressionists was the forgotten, that is, the “unofficial”, it is not surprising that these artists so admired the creation of mentally ill people, children or the elderly; beings separated from the traditional circuits of art and that, for them, represented the most genuine expression of it. The Blue Reiterfor example, is behind one of the first exhibitions that were held of the so-called “marginal art” or Art Brut in which the artistic creations of the patients were placed at the same level as that of the group members.
In the same way, primitive art fascinated the expressionists, because they saw in it that “lost paradise” that they longed for, alien to the putrid modern civilization that annihilated human beings. This was nothing new. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) had already done it a few years earlier when he left for Tahiti, and naïve artists (from the French for “naïve”) made their creations with a deliberately childish aesthetic.
The underlying idea in all of this was the prevailing need to escape from a suffocating society, whose norms and conventions stifled human nature. The ways to escape were diverse (madness, instincts, naivety of the childhood world, paradisiacal worlds) but the result was exactly the same: evasion.
Certainly, the contact of Die Brücke in its Berlin era with literary expressionism (tremendously forceful in its denunciation) and with radical formations such as Die Aktion They redoubled their anti-bourgeois desires and social denunciation. From 1911 onwards, then, expressionist creations, at least those from Germany, gave more importance to content. However, Die Brücke It no longer enjoyed the cohesion of yesteryear. In May 1913, his spokesperson, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, officially announced the dissolution of the group.
The great protagonists: Die Brücke and The Blue Reiter
The first names that we must bring up are the founders of the group par excellence of expressionism, the aforementioned Die Brücke (The bridge). The name is already very significant. In the letter where the members invited Emil Nolde (1867-1956) to join them, It was said that the name, “the bridge,” referred to the group’s objective, which was none other than to attract “all the revolutionary elements.” Die Brücke It was, therefore, a bridge that all those who wanted to shake up the foundations of the bourgeois world had to cross.
Müller, Kirchner and Nolde were the members who underwent the greatest evolution. While in the paintings of these artists the explosion of repressed emotions is sensed through an amalgam of darkness and faces that look like death masks, other expressionists such as Max Hermann Pechstein will continue to show a much more decorative exoticism.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) emerged from the beginning as the soul of the group and, in reality, his work would be the most representative. The characters that circulate through the cities in his paintings are not human beings, but automatons whose lives are controlled by some superior force. They have no will, their human soul has deteriorated to the limit. We see here, again, one of the maxims of expressionism: the city, civilization, society, as castrating agents of all that is good about the human being.
In another line of expressionism we must place Vasili Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Franz Marc (1880-1916) the creators of The Blue Reiter (The Blue Horseman), an ambitious artistic project that was born in 1911 in Munich. The immediate antecedent was Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Association of Munich Artists), which included almost all the relevant artists of the effervescent cultural scene of the Bavarian capital.
The artists of The Blue Reiter They only had in common with Die Brücke their fight against positivism and their rejection of bourgeois society. Kandinksy and company were supporters of a much more spiritual art, far removed from the unbridled impulses and dark worlds that Kirchner and his companions vomited, almost literally, onto the canvas.
The Blue Reiter He leans more toward refined painting, closely connected with other artistic expressions such as music Thus, while the Die Brücke artists expressed with, we could say, a certain “rapture”, Kandinsky’s philosophy was more inclined towards a liberation of the soul through color.
In Kandinsky’s works, the colors float, “dance” as if to the beat of music. The liberation of the tones and their separation from the motif are total, to the point that, already in his first paintings, the Russian painter aims for total abstraction. His ideas are captured in his immortal book Of the spiritual in art, published in 1911 and which is a true revelation about the expressive power of color. Obviously, Kandinsky’s work owed a lot to the unleashed brush of the Fauves.
Another component of The Blue Reiter was August Macke (1887-1914), who incidentally met his death in the ranks of the First World War at the young age of twenty-seven. Macke also achieved a delicate expression through the Fauvist coloring of his paintings. Among the female figures, it is important to highlight Gabriele Münter (1877-1962); She was Kandisnky’s partner and one of the most active (and forgotten) artists of German Expressionism.
