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Expressionism is a multi-faceted European movement to which the French, Germans, Austrians, Russians and Americans made significant contributions. It is a movement that was motivated by the same spirit, distancing itself from the reproduction of nature, seeking new shores of expression in ‘inner truth.’ Its manifestation is a fusion of the most varied forms. International exhibitions, public art collections and museums, paintings depicted in books and magazines, and primarily study trips by the artists themselves were not insignificant in contributing to the common direction of the new movement.

Since the middle of the 19^th century, Paris had been the epicentre of innovative artistic forces and was an eagerly visited by artists from around the world as a capital of the arts. Congenial French nonconformists Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh (though only a temporary resident in France) strongly influenced the movement towards modernist art by their exhibitions. Some of these exhibitions attained epoch-making significance like the 1912 Internationale Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne and the Blaue Reiter exhibition the same year in Berlin, as well as in 1913 the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon (First German Fall Salon) also in Berlin, and the Armory Show in New York, also that same year. In the years 1912 to 1914, an exhibition of the Italian Futurists also travelled the world.

In contrast to Fauvism, Expressionism developed in rich, multi-faceted directions and for many years influenced the European and American art world. Expressionism implied a lifestyle and did not limit itself to the visual arts. In addition to sculpture and painting, this liberal and unfettered way of interacting with artistic traditions also seized upon architecture, literature, film, music and theatre. Expressionism was more than an artistic movement. Between the turn of the century and World War I, Expressionism came to mean rebellion and the passionate stirring of the young elite. There were numerous cases of artists working in two genres: poets and painters like Ludwig Meidner, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schüler; sculptors and dramatists like Ernst Barlach; composers and painters like Arnold Schönberg. Expressionism was the artist’s answer to a world of increasing regimentation, social tensions, cultural conflicts and psychological burdens. In the essay for Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, Franz Marc wrote:

In our epoch of great struggle for a new art, we as the ‘Wild Beasts’ do not struggle in an organised fashion against an old organised authority. The struggle seems uneven, but in matters of the intellect, numbers are not decisive, but rather the strength of the ideas. The most feared weapon of the ‘Wild Beasts’ is their new way of thinking, which kills better than steel and breaks, what was considered to be unbreakable.

The Expressionists arose against cold mechanism, against the stifling authoritarian mindset. They wanted to do away with artificiality and searched, as the Fauves did, for the origins of human existence. In 1904, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner experienced the magical attraction of the African and South Seas in the anthropology museum in Dresden. Not only was he fascinated by the masks and carved cult figures, but the rites and way of life associated with them fascinated him.

In contrast to the Fauves, who primarily made use of stylistic-decorative elements, the artists of the Brücke focused their interest on the spiritual aspects, the originality and archaic powers of expression. They called themselves the ‘primitives of a new art.’ The goal was to intensify expression to the greatest extent possible and to shatter the ‘natural’ order. Styles were shattered, overextended, split, and colours burned in veritable rivers, even more excitedly than with the Fauves. ‘Empathy’ became the catchword, which the art historian Wilhelm Worringer found to describe this language of expression reaching into the deepest emotions. Franz Marc expressed in word and paint that ‘… pantheistic quality to empathise with the shivering and flowing of blood in nature, with the trees, with the animals, with the air.’

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, After the Bath, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 87 × 95 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

The Brücke and its Milieu

In Dresden, architecture students Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff joined together to form an artists’ association in 1905 under the name Brücke. It was their goal was to overcome the academic way of thinking and acting, to break traditions and ‘pull all the smouldering revolutionary forces over to our side,’ as Schmidt-Rottluff wrote to Emil Nolde. Soon, the painters Otto Mueller, Max Pechstein, and Cuno Amiet from Switzerland also joined. The basic requirement for membership was the ‘extension of the existing values with respect to the overall vision of the inner image.’ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the driving force behind the Brücke, described this in the Brücke platform:

With a belief in development, in a new generation of creators and connoisseurs, we call the entire youth together. […] Everyone belongs to us, who directly and authentically expresses that what he is driven to create.

They wanted, as their name implies, to build a bridge to like-minded people. Erich Heckel was the organiser of the group. So, for a monthly rent of 10 marks, it was he who leased an empty butcher shop, which was used as a common studio in which the first joint exhibition took place. The Brücke artists undertook to do everything together in the same sense as the medieval guilds of cathedral builders. This went so far that during their early period of creativity, their works were difficult to differentiate one from another. They did everything together, they had the same models and learned new techniques together, primarily wood carving, etching and lithography. In the years 1906 to 1912 they published yearly portfolios for their members that have today become a rarity.

In the winter months, the painters met for a ‘15-minute cycle’ where the nude model would change the pose every quarter of an hour. The resulting nude sketches were of great spontaneity but outside the guidelines of academia. From these studies, they developed the subject of the naked person in nature. From 1910 onwards, during the summer months, the painters went together to the Moritzburg lakes, Dangast or Nidden. There in open nature, in the light, air and sun, they felt unbound and free of the constraints of civilisation. They painted landscapes and nudes in the open air. Man and nature were depicted in open and direct colours, and the forms conveyed a cosmic unity. A strong and direct use of colour marked the paintings, as did an aboriginal stiffness of form, inspired by the ‘primitive’ cultures. The manner of painting is bold and impulsive. The style is spontaneous and emotional. Depictions of distance are solely produced by colour. The result is a special flattening of the colour.

Wood cuts fit especially well to this type of Brücke art. The coarsening of the forms and inherent expression due to the material qualities and the hardness and rigid surfaces suited the intentions for a heightening of expressive quality. As one can read in the diary they kept in common, they felt themselves to be ‘aristocrats of the spirit.’ The goal was not uniformity in the style of expression, but rather an ever more intensive search for the origins of the mystical secret of being ‘that stands behind the occurrences and things in the environment’, as Kirchner put it.

At first, Art Nouveau and Symbolism influenced the Brücke artists. An argument ensued with the ecstatically turbulent style of Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, as well as their subject of man and being. The painters only developed the striking and headstrong signature style of Brücke Expressionism, with its jagged directness, severity and linear simplicity, after they had become familiar with the works of Van Gogh and Cézanne. In honour of Paul Gauguin’s stay in the South Seas, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein left for their own journey to New Guinea and the islands of Palau in 1913 and 1914. Otto Mueller, who came to the Brücke in 1910, was in search of exotic beauty in his Gypsy portraits. With simple, large shapes and clear colours, they wanted ‘the richness, the joy of life, they wanted to paint people in celebrations, their feelings for and with each other. To depict love as well as hate,’ according to Kirchner.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Circus Horse Rider, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

In 1911, Heckel, Kirchner, Pechstein and Schmidt-Rottluff moved to Berlin. Each of the artists now went their own way. Der Sturm, the magazine and gallery, belonging to Herwarth Walden, became the place to turn to for the painters. Walden published Kirchner’s woodcuts for the first time. Together with Erich Heckel, Kirchner took part in the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. In 1913, Kirchner had his first exhibition at the Folkwang-Museum in Hagen. However, friction and differences of opinion inside the Brücke finally resulted in its dissolution, but the painters remained lifelong friends.

Before World War I, Berlin developed into the most important centre of culture in Europe alongside Paris, Dresden, and Munich. The prelude to this was the exhibition of Edvard Munch in 1892, which provoked waves of conservative anger. Exhibitions of other contemporaries followed. Progressive art magazines began to appear. Hugo von Tschudi was appointed as director in 1896 to the Nationalgalerie and single-mindedly promoted modernist artists. Bruno Cassirer organised his first Cézanne exhibition in 1901. In 1904, the German Artists’ Association was founded and the next year had its first exhibition of contemporary artists. From 1907 onwards, Fauvism, Expressionism and all the other modernist art movements were represented in a large number of Berlin galleries. The Neue Secession was formed in 1910, and one year later, the Erste juryfreie Kunstaustellung (the First Juryless Art Exhibit).

A visionary with a deft feeling for the future, Herwarth Walden gathered around himself the decisive creative forces in Der Sturm, the gallery he founded in the early part of 1912. From 1910 onwards, his magazine of the same name was published ‘in order to give artists cast out by the critics and the public a place to create.’ This magazine became the ‘organ of struggle’ of the new movements like Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism and Constructivism. Among the renowned artists and writers who were published in the fourteen volumes of the magazine were Hans Arp, Gottfried Benn, Franz Marc, August Stramm, Alfred Döblin, Fernand Léger, Max Pechstein, Kurt Schwitters, August Strindberg, Tristan Tzara, Guillaume Apollinaire, Umberto Boccioni, Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Filippo Marinetti and Wilhelm Worringer.

The gallery Der Sturm débuted in March 1912 with the Blaue Reiter and with Oskar Kokoschka followed by the Italian Futurists. Herwarth Walden reserved the summer exhibition for Marc, Münter, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Werefkin, who had been turned down by the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. French graphic art by Herbin, Gauguin and Picasso, as well as the Fauves and the expressive Belgians followed. In Der Sturm, Walden declared, ‘all the artists are exhibited of whom one will later say that they were the driving forces of their times’, and this was a vision that was to be confirmed. The high point of Walden’s exhibitions was to become the Este Deutsche Herbstsalon (First German Fall Salon), a counterpart to the Parisian Salon d’Automne. The Erste Deutsche Herbstalon gathered 366 works by 86 contemporary avant-garde artists from twelve countries, including among others, America, Russia and Spain. Walden, Marc, and Macke organised the Herbstalon together with financial support from the collector and patron, Bernhard Koehler. The public often reacted with indignation to the opening of the Herbstsalon. ‘Here, row upon row, the talentless are on exhibit.’ Franz Marc and the others were called, ‘a horde of paint-squirting loudmouths.’ However, there were some positive exceptions among the critics. ‘The opening day of the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon can be considered to be an historic date. There is something overpowering in seeing everywhere around one the champions and representatives of the new principles at work.’

The pulsating, almost feverish city life, the intellectual and cultural intensity, and the social contrasts had their influence upon the painting style of the Brücke artists. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, no doubt most towering artistic personality of the Brücke group, was intoxicated by life in the city, and this was reflected in the characteristically nervous eccentricity of his personal style. His depictions of people and street scenes exuded the flair of the glamourous and intense urban life. The structure of his paintings became tighter, edgier, and the forms, more dynamic. The vital energy of the present penetrated the electrically charged surface of the painting with dandies, prostitutes and pedestrians flitting eerily on their way. The futuristic technique of lining people up as if in a street scene and thereby producing the impression of continuously locomotive people fascinated Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the years 1912 to 1914. A relaxed brushstroke blurs the contours of the figures and shows movement by indicating direction. In the 1914 painting Friedrichstrasse, Berlin many growing figures are lined up as if moving behind one another, giving the impression that the people towards the back of the street are becoming younger and younger. The contours are blurred, and the figures are somewhat distorted. They seem to be transformed into a magical diagram of movement.

With the outbreak of the World War I, Kirchner volunteered as a driver for the artillery an experience which weakened his already frail physical and psychological state. In 1917, severely ill, he moved to Davos, Switzerland and finally settled down in Frauenkirch. The mountain environment and the power and majesty of nature moved him to his core. Henceforth, this became his artistic world. In spite of recurring illness and depression, he created a wide-ranging body of work and participated in many exhibitions.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street Scene (Friedrichstraße Berlin), 1914.

Oil on canvas, 125 × 91 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

After the National Socialists came to power in Germany, 639 works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were confiscated, of which 32 were shown at the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich. In the same year, the Detroit Institute of Arts showed the first Kirchner retrospective in America. On 15 May 1938, at the age of 58, he took his own life.

Erich Heckel’s early works have a flat and clearly contoured painting style marked by a raw and aggressive manner. His particular preference was for woodcuts, and his late works are marked by a certain lyrical quality. During the ‘Third Reich,’ 729 of his works were confiscated from museums and public collections, of which thirteen were shown at the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition. An air raid in 1944 destroyed his studio in Berlin. A great number of is works, including almost all the print blocks, were destroyed. He returned to Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance in a state of resignation.

Karl Schmidt, who upon joining the artist group in 1905 called himself Schmidt-Rottluff, gave the Brücke its name. Today, his early works have become the very epitome of early Expressionism. He devoted himself to four main subjects: nudes, landscapes, portraits and still lifes. Among the Brücke members, he is, therefore, the widest ranging. In 1907 he met the art historians Rosa Schapire and Wilhelm Niemeyer, who throughout their lives worked on his behalf. He was represented at the Entartete Kunst exhibit with 25 paintings, two watercolours and 24 pages of illustrations. 608 works by Schmidt-Rottluff were confiscated from German museums in 1938. During the same year, the Nierendorf Gallery in New York showed his watercolours. Three years later, he was banned from painting. His studio was also completely destroyed in 1943 by bombing, so he moved to Rottluff near Chemnitz. In 1945 he also lost all his paintings that had been stored for safe keeping at two estates in Silesia.

Max Pechstein was the only Brücke artist to have a university education. He completed his studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule Dresden (School of Applied Arts in Dresden) as a master class student, winning the Saxon state prize, the so-called Rome Prize. He joined the Brücke in 1906 and worked together with his new friends in the wild during the summer and in the studio during the winter. During a stay in Nidden in 1911, he focused on the nude. In his memoirs, he wrote: ‘So I continued my reflections upon capturing man and nature as one, more strongly and thoughtfully than at Moritzburg.’

New compositional experiments in the avant-garde art world of Berlin, such as the Orphism by Delaunay, Italian Futurism and French Cubism gradually began to come to his attention. Compositions from around 1912 to 1913 such as Still Life with Putto and Arum Lily, clearly show a withdraw from expressive colour and design they are replaced by Cubist and geometric elements that underscore the solid construction of the painting. In 1922, Max Pechstein became a member of the Prussian Academy of the Arts and just six years later he received the Prussian State Prize and became a member of the exhibition commission of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. In 1933 he was banned from working and exhibiting and was expelled from the Academy of the Arts in 1937. At the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, the works of Max Pechstein were also shown and 326 of his works were removed from German museums. However, in 1951 he was named as an Honorary Senator of the Belin Academy of Fine Arts.

Erich Heckel, Gläserner Tag, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 138 × 114 cm. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Otto Mueller, Three Nudes in the Forest. Watercolour, 68 × 51.5 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

Max Pechstein, Still Life with Putto and Arum Lily, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 100.5 × 77 cm. Private collection.

Otto Mueller was a master of figure composition and his subjects centred on the world of Gypsies. As he wrote in 1919 on the occasion of an exhibition of Paul Cassirer in Berlin, ‘The main goal of my efforts is with the greatest possible simplicity to express the emotions of man and landscape.’ Otto Mueller was the romantic among the Brücke artists. His delicate, exotic gypsies were composed in a landscape left to nature as if in a paradise. He preferred a subdued colouring, mostly green or ochre. From 1924 to 1930 Mueller travelled repeatedly to Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia to observe the fascinating world of the gypsies. Supposedly, his mother was the illegitimate child of a Bohemian maid and a Gypsy.

The flower paintings of Emil Nolde, either in watercolour or painting are enchantingly beautiful. He started with these subjects in 1909 saying, ‘It was on the island of Als in the middle of summer. The colours of the flowers attracted me irresistibly, and, almost suddenly, I was painting. So my first garden paintings were created.’

As we read in his notes, Mein Leben (My Life), ‘It was a difficult struggle with the colour… In my painting, I always wanted the colours, through me as the painter, to work logically on the canvas as though nature herself created the image, as ore and crystallisations forms, as moss and algae grows, as under the rays of the sun a flower unwraps and must bloom.’

His subjects were of the great and overpowering aspects of nature. His idea of nature was closely related to his heartfelt ideas and emotions.

Everything primeval always bound my senses. The great raging sea is still it its original state, the wind, the sun, even the starry sky is also probably still the same as it was almost fifty thousand years ago.

Nolde’s fixation with the primordial greatly influenced his use of colour, making it more concentrated and intense. His effort to paint his vision of the world through the strength and effect of pure paint evolved to a slow maturity. The first culmination of this came with his first flower and garden paintings from 1906 to 1908. Only in 1905 did he become acquainted with Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet and the other French artists, as well as the art of primitive cultures. Seeing these was the key to unlocking his full potential as an artist. Now, Emil Hansen, born in Nolde, found his unique painting vocabulary that found its climax in the ecstatic rush of colours which burst forth with a barbaric fire and sensuality. Emil Nolde was one of the great innovators of watercolour.

The series of religious paintings done by Emil Nolde are some of the most moving examples of natural experience. In 1912 he painted the nine piece altar The Life of Christ and the triptych Maria Aegyptica. In his notes, he wrote, ‘the colours are the material of the painter, the colours in their own lives, crying and laughing, luck and laughter, passionate and holy as love songs and the erotic, as song and choral music.’ In these paintings an ecstatic religious experience and feeling breaks forth. The sublime, the holy, the saintly speak from these works. They were to have taken a central place in the religious section of the 1956 World Exposition in Brussels but the Catholic clergy protested.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Summer, 1913. Oil on canvas, 88 × 104 cm.

Sprengel collection, Kunstsammlung Hannover, Hannover.

Max Pechstein, Seated young woman (Moritzburg), 1910.

Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 cm. Neue Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

Emil Nolde, Garden Full of Flowers, 1908.

Oil on canvas, 63 × 78.5 cm. Osthaus Museum, Hagen.

Christian Rohlfs, House in Soest, 1916.

Tempera on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Private collection.

Individuals

Christian Rolfs is only marginally associated with the Brücke. He was linked to Emil Nolde by a lifelong friendship since 1905. Both artists were united by their love of nature. Both sought to capture their view of the world in pure colour. In 1901 Rolfs was called to the Folkwang School in Hagen. Only in 1927, at the age of 78, did he travel south to Ascona. In the thin and relaxed atmosphere, he found his way to his own late painting style. The vigorous southern light fascinated him. He was entranced by the tropical plant life. The rush of colour that surrounded all the vegetation overpowered him, he, who had come out of the foggy north. ‘Everything is colour, light and a thrill for the eyes, enchanting and delightful and constantly changing from hour to hour.’ The material possibilities with regard to painting mediums always interested Christian Rohlfs, and he experimented with great curiosity. In the early years, he used a palette knife and applied the paint with wallops onto the canvas. With thin paint, he swabbed it up with a rag. He carefully chose the paper surfaces for his watercolours, as he incorporated them into his compositions. His watercolours display a flair for the immaterial. His entire body of work is closely based on nature.

From 1911–1912, the personal style of many painters became more turbulent and excited. In his late works, Lovis Corinth, usually a high-spirited Impressionist began to mirror the style of the Expressionists At the same time, Paul Klee’s personal style became marked by a rhythmic, mostly line-like or two-dimensional technique inspired by simultaneity and universal dynamism. In his work, Klee translates technical-mechanical concepts into movement, as expressed by arrows, triangles, and repetition of shapes.

Under the leadership of Ludwig Meidner, the Pathetiker group was formed in the early part of 1912. Otto Gleichmann, Richard Janthur, Jakob Steinhardt and Erich Waske belonged to this group. The art historian Paul Vogt commented: ‘Like the sound of a raging scream, their appearance required the strongest means possible to be heard in the Babylonian commotion of so many voices during that time.’ Hardly any other early Expressionist work produced in the years between 1912 and 1914 exudes such a singular and all-encompassing momentum of shock and emotion as those of Ludwig Meidner. His Apocalyptic Landscapes are a substratum of concentrated energy. Bursting houses, writhing, breaking lines of streets and fleeing people define the chaotic landscape. Meidner described his condition at the time, as if seismographically measuring the disaster of the impending world war:

Painful impulses made me break everything that was straight and vertical. To spread ruins, shreds and ash across all landscapes. How I always built ruins of houses on my cliffs, woefully divided, and the lamenting call of the bare trees rose up to the croaking skies above. As calling, warning voices the mountains floated in the background, the comet laughed hoarsely and the aeroplanes sailed as if they were hellish dragonflies in the yellow night time storm.

In the twenties, Meidner increasingly dedicated himself to his literary talents.

Among the main representatives of German Expressionism, Karl Hofer defines himself by the emphasis of formality and by a limited colour range. His unmistakeable style was formed around 1919; his paintings marked by an angular roughness and a dry colour, tending to a classic constructive composition. He wrote in 1953 in his memoires:

I possessed the Romantic; it was the Classic that I was looking for… I never created a figure according to the random nature of appearance… The ecstasy of Expressionism did not suite me… Man and the human were and will always be the object of my art.

Lovis Corinth, Walchensee, 1921.

Oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic City, 1913. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 115.5 cm.

LWL–Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster.

Karl Hofer, Circus Artists, c. 1921.

Oil on canvas, 148 × 118.5 cm. Folkwang Museum, Essen.

Paul Klee, Villa R, 1919.

Oil on cardboard, 26.5 × 22 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basel.

Franz Marc, In Regen, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 81 × 105 cm. Städtische Galerie, Lenbachhaus, Munich.

The Milieu of the Blaue Reiter

Expressionism, which was at home in and around Munich and southern Germany, evolved out of artistic personalities with various temperaments. From a common intellectual viewpoint, they developed common goals. A cosmopolitan nature characterised the artists, who were of various nationalities. Munich was the German art metropolis at the turn of the century before 1912. Berlin developed into the centre of the new art as well. The city attracted painters and sculptors, and its museums attracted a large public. The groups of artists working in the city, and the pulsating artistic activity together with the famous Schwabing art festivals could stand the comparison to Paris. In addition to the academy and the school for fine arts, several private art schools had established themselves, for example the art school of Anton Azbé. Not having known each other previously, the two young Russians, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky, crossed paths there.

Kandinsky founded his own art group, Phalanx, and, in 1902, his own art school. In the meantime due to his rising reputation abroad, primarily in Paris, he soon belonged to the most well-known young painters of Munich. In the village-like seclusion of Murnau (with memories of Russian folk art) his paintings had a festive quality and exuded an expressive overabundance and as a result, the conservative Munich Secession denied him permission to exhibit. Consequently, in 1909, together with Jawlensky and his companion, Marianne von Werefkin, along with Adolf Erbslöh, Alexander Kanoldt, Alfred Kubin and Gabriele Münter, he founded the New Artists’ Association. Their first exhibition took place in December 1909 at the Galerie Thannhauser, and a second followed in September 1910, in which Fauvist and early Cubist works were exhibited. This persuaded Franz Marc and August Macke to join. However, the judging for the third exhibition in the autumn of 1911 became a scandal: Kandinsky’s paintings had distanced themselves ever more from the objective, which Erbslöh and Kanoldt resisted. The New Artists’ Association, which had attracted some attention and gained a place for itself in the art world, split up.

Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded the Blaue Reiter.They came up with the name, Kandinsky later reported, in the summerhouse in Sindelsdorf belonging to Franz Marc. ‘We both loved blue, Marc – horses, I – the rider. So the name came by itself.’ At first this name was just meant for the almanac, the ‘organ of all new and true ideas of our day.’ The almanac appeared in 1912 together with Kandinsky’s publishing About the Intellectual in Art.

Most of the artists of the New Artists’ Association spontaneously joined the editorial staff of the Blaue Reiter. Their memorable exhibition again took place in December 1911 at the Galerie Thannhauser. In addition, Heinrich Campendonk joined the group along with Robert Delaunay from Paris, who invited the two Russians, David and Vladimir Burliuk, as well as the composer, Arnold Schönberg. Even paintings by Henri Rousseau, the father of the Naïve painters, were on display, which one can explain by the preference of the young Munich artists for Bavarian folk art and verre églomisé pictures. Their second exhibition, showing watercolours, drawings and prints, was held at the Galerie Hanns Goltz in March 1912. Paul Klee also took part at this exhibition, and Lyonel Feininger first joined this exhibition in 1913. The core of the Blaue Reiter was, in addition to Kandinsky and Franz Marc, made up of the Russian Alexej von Jawlensky and his companion, the painter and Russian baroness, Marianne von Werefkin, Kandinsky’s student and subsequent companion, Gabriele Münter, as well as August Macke and Heinrich Campendonk. Lyonel Feininger, Adolf Erbslöh, Alexander Kanoldt, the draughtsman Alfred Kubin, the French Cubist Henri Le Fauconnier, Karl Hofer and the composer Arnold Schönberg.

A collective style, as was the case with the Brücke, was impossible with artists of such varying artistic background and temperament. Everyone accepted the individual creative development and means of expression of the others. Their artistic point of departure was a formal and philosophical one. It was about transcendence. For Kandinsky and Franz Marc, art was on the same plane as religious outlook. Art was ‘made out of inner necessity, coming forth from the emotional depths, and thus it was possible, to make the soul of the observer pulse.’ The thinking was oriented along the pantheistic lines of coming to terms with nature and the overcoming of the material and objective with the aim of discovering one’s own ego. They gave preference to colour harmony, to the dissection and analysis of forms, not to their fragmentation. Their basic philosophical orientation was to make out of the invisible and untouchable, out of pure and simple experiences, a visible and touchable reality, and this necessarily led to the nonrepresentational.

Franz Marc used the colour of the Fauves, the appreciation of objects from Cubism, and the dynamic elements of Futurism. He stressed what was already valid in the 19^th century. In other words: detail, since as the expression has it, a part can mean more than the whole. His relationship with nature led to a new symbolic meaning for colours. In a bold move, he presented his depiction of his original concept of a living nature and the animal world. Wassily Kandinsky described his paintings, saying, ‘Marc is neither a painter of animals nor a naturalist nor a Cubist. In his paintings, the animals are so tightly fused into the landscape that despite the strength of expression, they are at the same time only an organic part of the whole.’

Franz Marc repeatedly reflected on his actions and desires in his painting:

I am looking to heighten my perception for the organic rhythm of all things. I seek to feel empathy in a pantheistic manner with the trembling and flowing of blood in nature, in the trees, in the animals, and in the air. I am looking to produce a painting with new movements and with colours that mock our old easel paintings.

Franz Marc, Fighting Shapes, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 91 × 131.5 cm. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Alexej von Jawlensky, Fairytale Princess with a Fan, 1912.

Oil on cardboard, 65.5 × 54 cm. Gift of Günther and Carola Peill, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

His painting, In the Rain, completed in 1912, shows the unity of all existence. The realism in the painting, the two squatting objects, the dog and the plants are partly unified and partly caught up in a network of iridescent rays of colour. It runs in a slanting manner like a carpet of colour over the canvas, sometimes in prism-like crystallisations. The viewer is presented a concrete representation of rain. This rain, however, is not a phenomenon that pours over the figures and nature; rather, it is an element that binds together and unites everything. In luminous colours, a strong red and a robust emerald green, Marc portrays the harmony of the ambience, and, now and again, white or violet shimmers through. Franz Marc dissolves the rigid organic form in dynamic surface movement. In his paintings this often result in a kaleidoscopic play of colour in which the still representational object is submerged and subordinated to the colourful structure.

Franz Marc succeeded with his efforts to integrate everything living and growing, resulting in the development of ever-larger experiments with shapes. The visit to the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon in Berlin made a strong impression on him. He reported: ‘a significant preponderance [of] abstract shapes that only speak as shapes and almost without any representational overtones.’ Then he went on to anticipate his later non-representational creations: ‘All forms are memories.’ In December 1913, he painted the works Stables and Cattle. Here and there, cattle-shaped animal parts emerge as if from a bone-laden path. From an almost stereotypically fashioned layout, Marc created figures and animals as though moulded out of his brush. The contrast between the static and moving shapes conveys a unique shifting and vibrating effect.

During his lifetime, Marc was in search of an adequate way to represent the organic rhythm in a painting that encompasses and pervades all of existence. During this period of intensive development he realised his first non-representational painting, Fighting Forms. These compositions suffice to show the interplay of the organic and the rhythms that encompass all existence. Fighting Forms, as the title suggests, portrays a conflict between two coloured objects. The luminous red form with bizarrely shaped appendages falls with full force upon a blue – black self-contained form. In the dualism of the colours – here the red expansive power, there the dark concentrated energy – dynamic tension is expressed. The publicist Franz Röthel in 1956 described it with appropriate expressiveness:

In the intoxicating colourfulness… it is like an ostentatious rattling of weapons. Threateningly, the large colour monsters crash into each other. Along the edges, winding curves size up the enemy. Flashing, fencing foil thrusts seemingly shine alight the sharp, melee of cutting forms.

Franz Marc became a soldier in World War I and was killed in action by 1916. Despite the short creative phase of his life, he bequeathed unto us the message of his vision contained in his wonderful paintings. It is an expressive message of the harmony of all existence and of unity with nature, urgently speaking to all living things. Franz Marc wrote to his wife from the war, ‘It is precisely the pure art that has no purpose, but is simply a symbolic act of creation, proud in and of itself.’ The Nazis had to remove his paintings from the Entartete Kunst exhibit, because the visitors stood in front of them too reverently.

Wassily Kandinsky seized upon this period of creativity with his whole personality and gave art an intellectual impetus with his research into the theoretical and methodological relationships between existence and art. His genius was to transform this period of creativity with new knowledge, thinking, and feeling. His worldview was shaped by German poetic Symbolism, by Stefan George, by the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling and Henri Bergson, by theosophy and anthropology and insight into the natural sciences, as well as by the changed conceptions of space and time. He was interested in Indian meditation and in his library there were works on breathing techniques, occult healing, and colour therapy.

His tendency towards the intellectual in art and his search for infinite and cosmic energy became the rationale for him to overcome the representational and to embrace the non-representational. He found new and unexplored worlds of intellectual renewal – something no artist before him had dared to do. This path led him to the discovery of object-forms and, eventually, to image elements that, in encrypted form, convey intellectual meaning. In his later and more mature style, cosmic existence and its diversity become noticeable. With the aid of his intuition, he attempted to convey the thoughts and secrets of the cosmos in mystical, yet at the same time, rational paintings full of colour and drama.

His very first encounter with the avant-garde was in 1898, when he saw the painting Haystacks at an exhibition of Claude Monet. In his autobiography he reported:

I was struck dumb that this painting was missing an object, and then I noticed with surprise and bewilderment that not only is the painting gripping, but it makes an indelible impact. This was the unimagined and, up until then, hidden power of the paint palette that went beyond my dreams. Painting was given a magical power and splendour.

Since then, Kandinsky was on the search for the secret that was hidden between art and nature. His first non-representational watercolour is thought to have been created in 1910, but it was probably not created until 1913. This, however, does not do anything to negate Kandinsky’s intellectual and methodological achievement. The first results of his non-representational painting were displays of lively and luminous colour. Lines criss-cross each other forcefully or fall down together in one direction. This apparent chaos obeyed the inherent order to visually capture the forces of the cosmos. In 1912 he exhibited at the Sturm in Berlin, and, in 1913, Herwarth Walden published a Kandinsky catalogue. After the outbreak of World War I, he moved to Switzerland and returned via Scandinavia to Moscow. There, he was assigned official posts and a professorship. However, in 1921 he returned to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus Weimar and later in Dessau. Together with Klee, Feininger and Jawlensky, he founded the Die Blauen Vier (The Blue Four) group, which lasted until it was disbanded in 1933. In 1933 Wassily Kandinsky left for to Paris and in 1937 the Nazis confiscated his paintings.

In this writings About the Intellectual in Art, written in 1910 and published in 1912, he made public his findings regarding colours and shapes and their inherent values. Similar to a musical score, he sought to produce a score for painting.

Yellow is the typical earthly colour. Yellow cannot be driven very far into the depths. When cooled off with blue, it obtains a… sickly hue. In comparison with the frame of mind of a person, it could function as the colour equivalent of insanity.

The corresponding shape is the triangle. White acts ‘as a great silence’, black sounds ‘as a dead nothing after the sun has been extinguished’, gray is ‘toneless and immoveable’, vermillion is ‘as an evenly glowing passion.’ He also assigns character and mood to shapes. Blue is the colour of the circle, and the circle represents perfection; the domed half circle represents peace. A horizontal line represents peace; pointing upwards it represents joy, and pointing downwards mourning. In the course of his life as a painter, he developed a vocabulary of symbols and colours. His paints become a script with rhythms and rules. ‘Composition is a combination of coloured and graphic shapes,’ said Kandinsky. There is no hierarchy of methods. The order within the composition is subject to the control of the intellect. However, the origin of the action would be an ‘inner necessity.’ In the later paintings, Kandinsky developed a language of small particles. Biomorphic, fantastic creatures float and interact in cosmic worlds. He formulated his visions with playful cheerfulness, which had a hint of the surreal.

His encounter with Henri Matisse led Alexej von Jawlensky to his compositions of big radiating spots of colour that he, unlike Matisse, surrounded with broad-brush strokes. Jawlensky radically renewed the use of the human image as a subject for painting in the first half of the 20^th century. With imperturbable resolution, he took the image from the splendid vibrancy of Expressionism and transformed it into a constructivist abstraction. The impact of World War I, made his form of expression increasingly intellectual. This resulted in internalised, symbolic Meditation panels.

Even in her youth, Marianne von Werefkin was called the ‘Russian Rembrandt.’ Later in Munich, she became the intellectual centre of the Blaue Reiter. Painters like Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Jawlensky and Kandinsky valued her innovative spirit and her broad artistic view. For 30 years she lived and worked together with Alexej von Jawlensky, encouraging his talent, first in St Petersburg and then in Munich. From 1907 she produced a great many paintings which serve as a testament to the great significance of her art at the beginning of the 20^th century. Circus (Before the Show) from 1909–1910 is one of her masterpieces. The composition stylistically moves between Art Nouveau and Expressionism. On the one hand, the painting shows the influences of French painting, and, on the other side, a daring use of colour, and, in the use of the surfaces, a concept of abstract compositional structures. Long drawn surfaces in various colours and patterns divide the painting.

The work by Gabriele Münter shows lively, fresh colours and a powerful organisation of space. In the early Murnau years, she produced landscapes and still lifes.

Alexej von Jawlensky, Portrait of the dancer Alexander Sakharov, 1909.

Oil on cardboard, 69.5 × 66.5 cm. Städtische Galerie, Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Wassily Kandinsky, Amazon, 1918.

Paint on glass, 32 × 25 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm. Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow.

Gabriele Münter, Jawlensky and Werefkin, 1908–09.

Oil on canvas, 32.7 × 44.5 cm. Städtische Galerie, Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Marianne von Werefkin, Circus (Before the Show), c. 1910.

Gouache, 55 × 90 cm. Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren.

Expressionism in Austria

Until 1918, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka defined the art scene in Vienna. There, all the political, social, and artistic trends of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian monarchy came together, and it is here that the uniquely Viennese Art Nouveau developed. It showed the influences of French Symbolism and the Munich Secession. It became ever more luxuriant, subtle, and psychologically exaggerated. Above all else, it was very reflected the eroticism present the insights of Sigmund Freud, who was, at the time, publishing the results of his psychoanalytical research.

Gustav Klimt is the main representative of this imposing, sumptuous Art Nouveau. Even when he began to incorporate Expressionist decorative elements into his visual language, there was no denying his origins. Though he depicted the human subjects of his paintings with a greater emphasis on their traits, he still surrounded them in a splendidly ornamented background of mosaic-like spatial decoration. Klimt was the darling of Viennese society. The figures are encapsulated in a veil made of ornaments that seem to be taken from Egyptian or Byzantine mosaics and are just as extensive and splendidly colourful in gold, silver or black. In contrast to this, he depicted the head and the face in a dainty manner exuding tenderness and emotional ecstasy.

Egon Schiele, who was nearly twenty years younger, did not have much time to make is mark on the world. By 1918, he was dead at the age of 28. Nevertheless, he left an astonishingly impressive body of work. Daringly, he very quickly achieved a unique and unmistakeable visual language that was harsh and ascetic, bizarre, and rough. He deliberately presented deformations of the body and psyche, as well as the emotional suffering and depression among primarily the lower social classes. His works have a touch of death and melancholy. The erotic ecstasy in his works provoked public outrage. He was imprisoned for four weeks in 1912, ‘for the production of pornographic images.’ In the same year, he was invited to the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne.

In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka, inspired by Sigmund Freud, began a series of psychological portraits. With x-ray-like vision, he analysed the eternal conflict between the genders. Kokoschka created existential portraits of people without pretension or masks. He was a portrait painter with a high degree of emotional sensitivity and the ability to reveal through the visual image. Kokoschka’s hallucinatory and visionary gift allowed him to plumb the state of the psyche and to enter the soul of his subjects. He himself once aptly described himself as a ‘psychological can opener.’ One example of this is the portrait of the psychiatrist Auguste Forel done in 1910. In the same year, Kokoschka moved to Berlin and for a short time found a new home with Herwarth Walden, who repeatedly displayed his work. The Viennese critics in 1911 described his portraits as follows:

He paints faces of people who wilt in the bad office air… Possibly, this is a left-wing depiction… nothing more than the hopeless expression of a painful soul in the state of decay… He brews his colours together out of poisonous putrefaction… they shimmer bile yellow, fever green, frost blue… ointment-like he smears them and leaves them scratchy and encrusted, scarred and crusty… Depravity is the lure of these paintings. They have, of course, meaning as a manifesto of an era of decay, but seen artistically, they are a massacre of colour.

The vibrant city of Berlin, where he stayed several times until the outbreak of the war, dynamised Oskar Kokoschka’s painting style more and more. A striking example is from The Hurricane of 1914, which shows the artist himself with his lover, Alma Maria Mahler. A nearly ornamental brushwork captures the situation in a flowing movement.

Kokoschka was, like many artists of the classic modernist school, not only a painter but also a writer. He spent the years between 1917 to 1923 in Dresden, where he had followed the actress Käthe Richter from Berlin. During this time, when he taught at the Dresden academy, he did many portraits of scholars, literati and actors. His style had now become markedly calmer. He chose colours that were strong and luminous. He applied them in broad strokes, often with a palette knife. Colour became almost autonomous. They were applied in thick coats upon the canvas. Colour became a material. During the Dresden period, he completed the portrait called The Persian. It shows the publisher and art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt. He applied coloured dot next to coloured dot with a palette knife. Luminous red is the main accent, whose effect is velvety soft, and the paste-like colour formation has a carpet-like effect. The depiction conveys authority, peace and ease. After 1924, Kokoschka travelled around Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This resulted in a series of landscapes and cityscapes like those of Prague, Lyon, London, and Constantinople. Far beyond an Impressionistic depiction, he captured the play of light, the moment, the essential nature of things and the creation of a certain dynamism. His work in its entirety remains connected to the visible and the representational.

Egon Schiele, The Embrace (Couple II, Man and Woman), 1917.

Oil on canvas, 98 × 169 cm. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907–1908.

Oil, gilt and silver plating on canvas, 180 × 180 cm.

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Oskar Kokoschka, The Wind’s Fiancée, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 181 × 221 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basel.

August Macke and Rhenish Expressionism

Curious, the young generation seeks to see and experience everything that is new. In many cities, people gathered in Secessionist societies. Thus, the exchange of information among artists increased, as well as their acceptance in society. In the open-minded Rhineland, there was contact with the most important centres of art. The connections to France and Paris were closer there than elsewhere. That lent the art of this region an especially French feeling. Expressionism was more moderate here. The jagged splintering of shapes or the ecstasy of colour appeared only seldom among the Rhinelanders and only in moderated form. The Rhenish painters were more likely to be oriented towards Fauvism and Cubism, but, above all else, towards the Orphism of Robert Delaunay. The young August Macke from Bonn was a driving force and a towering personality. He was in close contact with the Blaue Reiter and took part in organising the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon in 1913 in Berlin. Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism and the Blaue Reiter all gave the artists living in the Rhineland impressions that, taken all together, developed into Rhenish Expressionism with its special lyrical tinge.

The crucial cultural event occurred in the summer of 1912 in Cologne, where the International Exhibition of the Sonderbund West German Friends of Art and Artists at Cologne had a total of 634 paintings, sculptures and hand drawings on display. For the first time ever at this world exhibition, all the leading and driving forces of modernist art from Impressionism to Picasso were brought together. The most important artists from our view today, the trailblazers of modernist art such as Van Gogh, Munch, Cézanne and Gauguin were given dedicated exhibition halls. The effect was international, definitive, sweeping, and an impetus for the famous Amory Show, which was held in the early part of 1913 in New York. At this event, more than 1500 exhibits were shown, a third of them being European.

The effect of the famous Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 in Cologne (which for many of the artists was a revelation) was also felt immediately among the young Rhinelanders. A touring exhibit of Italian Futurists during October of 1912 in Cologne reinforced this. This exhibit had previously been seen with Herwarth Walden in Berlin and was now being taken by August Macke to the Rhineland. From the knowledge gained from the exhibited avant-garde, the art of the young Rhineland painters developed further. After the World War I, they came together in the Junges Rheinland (Young Rhineland).

For the first time in July 1913, the artistic avant-garde of the West put on a combined exhibit in the art salon of the Cohen Bookstore. Wilhelm Worringer, who taught at the University of Cologne, had an academically open-minded view of Expressionism and Modernist art. August Macke, along with sixteen other young artists, took part in one of the first joint exhibitions titled Rhenish Expressionists. These included Ernst Moritz Engert, Franz M. Jansen, Joseph Kölschbach, August Macke’s cousin Helmuth Macke, Carlo Mense, Heinrich Nauen, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Hans Thuar, Heinrich Campendonk, Franz Henseler and Max Ernst, who in his early paintings was, without doubt, an Expressionist before he became famous as Dada Max and the founder of Surrealism. However, the exhibition was not able to contribute to the long-term cooperation between the participating artists, as the next year World War I destroyed all international relations, and August Macke died in France in the first days of the war.

For the first time at this exhibition of the Rhenish Expressionists, trends that had been observed earlier in Berlin and Munich were also seen in the Rhineland. This was because a generation of artists was emerging with ideas from the European renewal, namely, Early Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, melding these into a unified and overarching way of painting that they wanted to develop further from the old into a new continuing unity. The rather carefully worded statement concerning this Rhenish art was formulated by the Cologne art critic, painter and writer, Rudi Mense: The common goal of these artists was ‘to capture the secretive and rather mysterious language of things and to hold the inner light of the world, its melodious meaning and its ringing existence and to approximate this in a painting.’ Max Ernst reported later: ‘We were joined by a thirst for life, poetry, freedom, the pursuit of the absolute, for knowledge.’

Heinrich Campendonk, In the Forest, c. 1919.

Oil on canvas, 83.8 × 99 cm. Gift of Robert H. Tannahill, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

August Macke belonged to the German painters who, shortly after 1910, struggled not only theoretically, but also from the artistic point of view, with the artistic trends of their day. Macke recognised that ‘All these things, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and abstract painting are just terms for the change that we want our artistic thinking to make and is making.’ This he intuitively understood and was the basis for his further development. They were Impressionism, specifically George Seurat and the linear rhythm; the colour panes of Robert Delaunay and movement through colour; as well as Futurism, of which he thought: ‘Contemporary painting can avoid this idea even less than Picasso.’

In the autumn of 1912, Macke, together with Franz Marc, visited Robert Delaunay in Paris, who then in January together with Apollinaire came to Bonn for a return visit. In March 1913, Delaunay exhibited a larger number of his works in Cologne. Macke was impressed most of all by Fenètres.

Already in Paris, I had the feeling that I had before me some very significant things. …My heart opens up when I see the houses and the Eiffel Tower through these windows with sunlight shinning through them… I almost always think about this. The reflecting windowpanes through which on a sunny day one can see the city and the Eiffel Tower.

Simultaneity was the magic word of the movement then. Man and his surroundings were the main subjects for Macke’s paintings. In particular, it is the youthful elegance of women, who in the world of his paintings are composed of rhythm, movement, and reflections. He used variations of the doubling principle associated with the Futurists Balla and Russolo in his scenes. He also used Boccioni’s technique for visualising the invisible and Ardengo Soffici’s method of depicting acoustic components with dots.

Heinrich Campendonk was a friend of August Macke and Franz Marc. His landscape depictions during his most creative period culminate in spatial and temporal simultaneity of varying impressions and sequences into a characterisation of landscape and action. Animals and vegetation, buildings and objects stand in close relationship to one another and are connected and pervaded by an atmospheric network rendered visible. Everything is combined and is not defined by either shape or colour. Coloured bands of oscillation pass through and enliven the painting surface. Similar to Franz Marc, Campendonk also frees colour from the dependency of the visible and assigns to it values of its own.

Paul Adolf Seehaus who was Macke’s only student, also belonged to the circle of artists. He had a natural rhythm, and he felt himself obliged to the organic world, to the countryside and the architecture placed in it.

‘It is all about the contrast,’ he wrote in an essay shortly before his death in 1919, ‘not about what has been seen, but rather what has been experienced – it is out of this that the painter must express himself. Only in this way can he feel the rhythm of things, only in this way can he make seen to people, only in this way will he become a praiseworthy prophet.’

His biographer K. F. Ertel commented: ‘It is as if felt the pulse of nature, both turbulent and calm.’

It was the desire of Wilhelm Morgner to express himself entirely free of nature by only using colour and brush strokes to indicate direction. In 1912 he painted Ornamental Compositions in several variations. They are constructed in groups of combined shapes. Morgner makes use of harmoniously curved lines. These indicate direction and suggest movement. ‘The manner in which the lines are given is supposed to be the ongoing waving of my ego, like an echo that is created by some instrument and then continues the same wave in the air, as the instrument has given it,’ Morgner wrote in 1911.

August Macke, In Front of the Hat Shop, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 54 × 44 cm. Private collection.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.

Oil on canvas, 243.9 × 233.7 cm. Acquired through the

Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Georges Braque, Workshop II, 1949. Oil on canvas, 131 × 163 cm.

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.