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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Girl under a Japanese Parasol, 1909.

Oil on canvas, 92 x 80 cm.

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

This chapter examines the central importance, in many Expressionist works, of the relationship between man / woman and nature. The nude played a pivotal role in the Brücke’s practice, where it was often an idealised symbol of moral, physical and sexual liberation. The body and sexuality was differently cast in other Expressionist contexts, as further chapters will explore.

Expressionism is often subject to cliché and misunderstanding. It has sometimes been dismissed as an aberrant detour in the onwards march of European modernism. The influential American critic Clement Greenberg felt, for example, that Kandinsky’s work suffered as a result of the context from which it emerged: “Picasso’s good luck was to have come to French modernism directly, without the intervention of any other kind of modernism. It was perhaps Kandinsky’s bad luck to have had to go through German modernism first”. At other times Expressionism has been over-dramatised as an irrational manifestation of a peculiarly Teutonic neurosis. More accurately, it has been described in terms of a “cultivated rebellion”. In order to understand the many forms Expressionism took in Dresden, Berlin, Munich, Vienna and numerous provincial outposts, it is useful to grasp what it was rebelling against.

In common with much of Western Europe, Wilhelmine Germany in the late nineteenth-century was in a state of massive upheaval. The rampant effects of modern capitalism – industrialisation, urbanisation, rationalisation and secularisation – created ruptures in the social fabric that were not easily absorbed or contained. In spite of this, the process of Germany’s economic modernisation, supervised by an absolutist military state, was carried out with precision and discipline – even though these were qualities sometimes lacking in the monarch himself. Traditional morality both relied upon and fed orderliness and the power of institutions: above all, the monarchy, the church, the family, school and the army. Paul Klee, a Swiss, satirised with cruel precision a particularly Prussian “virtue” – unquestioning obedience to authority – in an early etching. It shows a grotesquely fawning monarchist, ludicrous in his nakedness, bowing down so low before an apparition of a crown that he appears on the verge of toppling into the abyss.

Expressionism was a self-consciously youthful movement. The “Founding Manifesto of the Brücke” (quoted in the previous chapter) proclaims it clearly. It bears witness to the generation gap, which had widened to a gulf. In their age, the primary influence on young people was no longer parental, but increasingly, social. The programme very clearly identifies “a new generation of creators” and “youth”, striving for “freedom of life”, as a group quite distinct from the “long-established older forces”. Significantly, Kirchner’s call to youth was not unique. At this time, many young Germans were discovering group identities for themselves. After the turn of the century, numerous youth groups formed, the largest of which became the Wandervögel movement.

Erich Heckel, Girl with Doll (Fränzi), 1910.

Oil on canvas, 65 x 70 cm.

Private collection.

Immersion in the German countryside as an antidote to the city was not just a recuperative measure. It was a whole ideology. This encompassed urban workers’ associations seeking alleviation from city drudgery by means of invigorating country hikes, student organisations, Christian and Jewish groups, communities inspired by German paganism, ultra-nationalists as well as socialist pacifists, anarchists, vegetarians, those interested in Eastern philosophies, and all manner of others seeking reforming lifestyles. Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement was a direct expression of the desire for a return to pre-industrial values, so it is not surprising that John Ruskin and William Morris were among the prophets often upheld by these groups. Jugendstil, iconographically and stylistically “youthful”, organic and anti-materialist, was often the nearest visual metaphor for this ethos. In a large, highly stylised canvas by the eminent Swiss painter, Ferdinand Hodler (whose distinctive “parallelism” is also related to Jugendstil), the abstract concept of “truth” is given allegorical form in the figure of a gleaming female nude, whose light dazzles the draped male figures around her. The widespread Freikörperkultur, naturism, or “Free Body Culture” movement, originated in this context. Most of these were middle-class movements, but they shared a desire to establish a principled independence from the crass materialism of modern life.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marzella, 1909–1910.

Oil on canvas, 76 x 60 cm.

Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fränzi in Front of Carved Chair, 1910.

Oil on canvas, 71 x 49.5 cm.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

The foundation of groups such as the Brücke can be seen as part of this predominantly youthful German movement. They “belonged” to a new age that was not their parents’. This helps to account for their rejection of the public moral and spiritual values of the older generation. It also sheds light on other Expressionists’ imagery of youth. There is more than a whiff of Nietzsche around Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s young, contemplative, ascending youth, for example. Its articulation of both the inwardness and the aspirational vitalism of the generation moved many who saw it.

It was particularly through representations of the body, sexuality, and nature that many Expressionists enacted both their resistance to bourgeois culture and their accompanying search for rejuvenated creativity. In this context, the naked frolics of the Brücke artists and models on their summer excursions to the Moritzburg lakes north of Dresden are not the lunatic forays of decadent bohemians, but are also related to existing contemporary trends. They went there in the summers of 1909, 1910 and 1911. Max Pechstein gave an idyllic description, recalling the spirit of their trip in 1910, when he, Kirchner and Heckel were accompanied by friends and models: “We lived in absolute harmony; we worked and we swam. If a male model was needed… one of us would jump into the breach”. The communal harmony was entirely in keeping with the utopian spirit of Gemeinschaft, or “community”.

On the 1910 trip to Moritzburg, Kirchner painted his Nudes Playing Under a Tree. This and other works, such as a woodcut showing a group of nudes playing with reeds, show evidence of Kirchner’s interest in a set of carved and painted wooden beams that he had recently sketched in the Dresden Ethnographic Museum. These carvings, from a men’s club in the Micronesian Palau Islands, depicted scenes of daily life and erotic mythology, such as a story of a native with a giant penis who was capable of penetrating his wife on another island. Pechstein was so enamoured with his fantasy of life in the South Seas that, like Gauguin before him, he actually travelled to the Palau Islands in 1914. Kirchner’s “primitivism” too is not purely stylistic; it also involves an eroticism that is deliberately unsophisticated, “instinctive” and implicitly primeval. This would have been at odds with even the more liberated of the conservative nature-worshippers. The “primitivism” aspired to by the Wandervögel and free body cultists was essentially either pan-German medievalism or “healthy” asexual aestheticism, not liberated sexuality. The embracing couple in Kirchner’s painting alone goes against the terms of conservative German naturism, which had a strong emphasis on health and often prescribed gender-segregated areas for its patrons. Thus, while the Brücke joined their fellow Germans in their escapes to the country, their physical and aesthetic response to nature had very little to do with intellectualised therapy or sentimental nationalism.

Back in the city, the Brücke studios in Dresden were communal, social environments for creativity and liberated nudity. A later photograph of a friend, Hugo Biallowons, dancing naked across Kirchner’s Berlin studio, although taken after the Brücke had disbanded, conveys something of this ambience. These were other “alternative” spaces, outside the norms of public life. The Brücke’s work, lifestyle and interiors are all redolent of a reaction against “civilised” sophistication and “civilised” sexual etiquette. The rough-hewn wood sculptures and woodcuts they made were part of the search for a “direct” way of working. It is also no coincidence that Kirchner painted his human subjects with pseudo-African carvings, exotic accessories or against backdrops of the murals and wall-hangings with “primitive” motifs of lovers that decorated their Dresden studios.

Franz Marc, Shepherds, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 100 x 135 cm.

Pinakothek der Moderne Kunstareal München, Munich.

Late in 1909, Kirchner and Heckel began using two young girls, Fränzi and Marzella, aged somewhere between ten and fifteen, as models for numerous paintings and graphic works (pp.39–41). They came from the local working-class district of Friedrichstadt. In the Brücke works, they sometimes appear in outdoor settings – they accompanied the artists to the lakes in 1910 – but usually they are in the studio, often nude and shown with dolls, animals or “primitive” carvings. Adolescent subjects had provided powerful and controversial material in Germany already. Frank Wedekind’s play, Frühlingserwachen (Spring’s Awakening), written in 1890–91, focused on the tragic fate of three adolescents for whom the onset of puberty awakens feelings and emotions that throw them into direct conflict with the strictures of bourgeois morality. Breaking several taboos at once (homosexuality, suicide and abortion among them), it was banned in Germany for several years. But by the time the Brücke were working, it had been successfully staged many times and was enjoying great popularity. It provided a blueprint for a whole genre of Expressionist literature revolving around generational conflict, which also included a wider “revolt of the sons against the fathers”, as it came to be known. In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka produced a book of prints and poems called Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys) at the beginning of his career in 1908. It, too, draws upon adolescence as a liminal state of heightened sensitivity, conflict and unresolved yearnings.

With the obvious exception of the work of Egon Schiele in Vienna, it is rare to find painted images of adolescents with such psychological presence. The Brücke works do not represent them merely as undeveloped versions of adults, nor are they sentimentalised. Instead, they have a disconcerting character stemming from the mixture of childhood innocence on the one hand and a developing self-awareness on the other. Brücke bohemianism negated the conventional “shame” of the body and nakedness, but did not replace it with a corresponding “innocence”. In Kirchner’s 1910 portrait of Fränzi in front of a Carved Chair, she stares out at us with a mask-like face. Her form is echoed in the roughly-hewn anthropomorphic chair, which can be seen more clearly in a related pastel drawing. The chair was one of the earliest pieces of Brücke furniture, inspired by Cameroon sources, carved by Kirchner out of limewood planks and painted pink and black. The acid, artificial colours of Fränzi’s face, suggestive of inexpertly daubed make-up, leave room for some ambiguity between playfulness and knowing sophistication. They also contrast ironically with the “flesh” tones of the rough, inanimate chair in a conscious play on nature and artifice. With this slippage, Kirchner implicitly allies the young adolescent with “the primitive”.

In the autumn of 1911, the Brücke artists left the serene, Baroque city of Dresden and moved to Berlin; the bursting, industrial metropolis. The artists began to grow apart. They quarrelled. It seems the final straw was Kirchner’s egocentric account of the Brücke in his Chronik der Brücke (Chronicle of the Brücke) published in 1913. The group’s split was rancorous, far from the spirit of their idyllic summer sorties in the past. But the artists’ search for the longed-for synthesis of man and nature continued during the Berlin years. In 1912, Kirchner sought out a more remote location – returning to a place he knew, the island of Fehmarn, in the Baltic off the Holstein coast. Under the influence of Ajanta wall-paintings, he explored a new sculptural dimension to his painting. The work he did on Fehmarn was decisive for his development. As he put it: “This was where I learned to give form to the ultimate unity of man and nature and completed what I had begun in Moritzburg. The colours became milder and richer, the form stricter”.

Erich Heckel, Day of Glass, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 138 x 114 cm.

Pinakothek der Moderne, Kunstareal München, Munich.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Summer, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 88 x 104 cm.

Sprengel Museum, Hannover.

Striding into the Sea is a positive image of man in dynamic harmony with nature. The sea has baptismal connotations of rejuvenation, cleansing and rebirth. The monumental, even heroic figures step easily and fearlessly over the waves. The bather lying on the beach seems rooted in the shore, like the rocks. The figures here are more purposeful, less playful than in the Moritzburg pictures. The Fehmarn scene is “idyllic”, but in a more profound, utopian sense: it is not a hedonist’s idyll, but articulates a higher, spiritual “unity of man and nature”. Kirchner endowed his bold, universal men and women with serene vitality – those qualities so quickly sapped in the enervating city. In keeping with Expressionism’s growing maturity, the oceanic recuperation monumentalised in paintings such as this can be seen to have fulfilled a more existential need than did the playful excursions to Moritzburg.

At the end of his life, Kirchner wrote that the American poet Walt Whitman had been responsible for his outlook on life. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was translated into German in 1907 and created a sensation. It became a celebrated and vital source for a whole generation of Expressionist painters and poets. The ideal of guiltless, unfettered sexuality and sexual equality found in groups like the Brücke was confirmed by their reading of Whitman. Later, Kirchner described how in times of suffering and hunger in Dresden and after, Leaves of Grass was an abiding source of encouragement.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Man and Woman Striding into the Sea, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 146 x 200 cm.

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart.

A passage from “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass is interesting to consider in relation to Man and Woman Striding into the Sea. Whitman submits himself, naked, to the sea as if it were a lover. In so doing, he expresses ecstatically the longed-for fusion with nature itself that became so central to Expressionist thinking:

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bathers at Moritzburg, 1909–1926.

Oil on canvas, 151.1 x 199.7 cm.

Tate Modern, London.

Indeed, it is noticeable that in many Brücke pictures of this period, men and women are often physically wedged between rocks, into the nooks of tree branches, between the rolling sea’s waves or sprawled on the sand – literally embedded in nature. In a painting made the following summer by Schmidt-Rottluff, the simplified forms, the red of the figures and the dunes as well as the lack of horizon all amplify a comparable sense of archaic synthesis between human beings and nature.

It is also interesting to compare, in this respect, the work of Franz Marc. A key member of the Blaue Reiter circle, and thus engaged in different debates around art, Marc was a painter with an intensely sensitive affinity with nature. However, his response to nature is not mediated by man’s presence in it or by the vitality of the natural body, such as we see in the Brücke works. His work is overwhelmingly concerned with the landscape, the animal kingdom and natural phenomena. There is only an occasional human presence in these landscapes.

Furthermore, his humans, unlike his animals, are strangely ephemeral and undifferentiated. Even when they are physically active – for example, carrying felled timber or bathing in a waterfall – they are oddly passive. They even have a somnambulist quality. Their gaze is downcast, their eyes closed. They neither luxuriate in, nor animate the landscape. In Marc’s work, men and women are either incidental or have no place at all in a world that belongs to his complex, sentient animals. In his Shepherds of around 1911, a telling role reversal has taken place; while the shepherds doze, naked, placid and vulnerable, the horse and cow seem to stand guard and keep watch, quietly alert.

The Brücke’s Rousseauean longings were, indeed, only a part of the wider Expressionist movement’s fascination and engagement with the human form. For all its sexual democracy, belief in ideal equality between the sexes, and rejection of the conventional artist-model relationship, the Brücke nonetheless consisted of male artists focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on the female nude.

Furthermore, almost all of their human subjects (in the period prior to the 1913 split) are young, attractive and healthy. In line with their bohemian aspirations, they celebrated “marginal” figures, from adolescents to circus performers and prostitutes, but in this period, their embrace only rarely extended to older subjects, the infirm, the sick or the unexotic. In general, it was elsewhere and later that more nuanced variations on the body could be found within Expressionism.

Ultimately, the Great War and its shattering effects on European civilisation as well as on individual bodies was what rendered early Expressionism’s vital exuberance and fantasies of wholeness no longer tenable. Later chapters will examine these effects in further detail.

There is, within Expressionism, another, very different dramatisation of the body. Appropriately, it is to Vienna, city of Freud and psychoanalysis that we look. From here emerged some of the most dramatic, controversial and unflinching Expressionist representations of the body, its sensations and the inner psychic life of human beings. This is the subject of the next chapter.

Egon Schiele, Kneeling Girl in Orange-Red Dress, 1910.

Gouache, watercolour and black crayon on paper, 44.6 x 31 cm.

The Leopold Collection, Vienna.