c. 1905–1925

Expressionism

In June 1905, four architecture students in Dresden founded an artists’ group called Brücke, the Bridge. They wanted to show not what they saw but what they felt, in strident colours and hard outlines, cut with a knife into wood. Expressionism became the defining art movement of the German-speaking world, and three decades later a target of the Nazis.

A summer at the Moritzburg lakes

In the summer of 1910, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein took their models to the lakes at Moritzburg, north of Dresden. They swam, drew and painted outdoors, naked bodies among the reeds and trees, dashed down in minutes. In the studio, Kirchner called this exercise the “quarter-hour nude”: the model was to move freely rather than pose. The pictures of that summer, in glowing yellows, greens and pinks, became the epitome of early Expressionism, a dream of a free and natural life beyond the stiff respectability of imperial Germany.

Today these pictures are also viewed more critically. The group’s models included young girls, and recent exhibitions have openly addressed this imbalance of power.

A programme cut in wood

Kirchner, Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, then students at the Technical University in Dresden, founded Brücke on 7 June 1905. The name probably alludes to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which humankind is described as “a bridge and not a goal”. In 1906 Kirchner cut the group’s programme in wood: “Everyone who renders directly and authentically whatever drives him to create is one of us.”

The woodcut became Brücke’s signature. The artists found it in Albrecht Dürer, but also in objects from Africa and Oceania that they saw in Dresden’s ethnographic museum. Coarse areas, splintering edges and the refusal of subtle gradations suited their aim of appearing direct and raw. That they treated objects from colonial contexts as a source of the “primal”, without asking about their origins or meaning, is now an important subject of research. Supporting, so-called passive members received an annual portfolio of prints. Max Pechstein joined in 1906, Emil Nolde belonged briefly, and Otto Mueller joined in 1910.

Forerunners and a new word

The roots lie in the 1880s and 1890s. Vincent van Gogh had used colour to carry emotion; Paul Gauguin had freed it from fidelity to nature. Edvard Munch painted fear, jealousy and death. When he exhibited in Berlin in 1892, the outcry was so great that the Association of Berlin Artists closed the show after a few days. In Paris in 1905, Henri Matisse, André Derain and their friends caused a stir at the Salon d’Automne, where a critic dubbed them “fauves”, wild beasts.

The term “Expressionism” emerged in 1911 around the Berlin Secession, initially applied to young French painters such as Georges Braque, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Only later was it transferred to the German artists, who themselves rarely used it.

Big-city Berlin

In 1911 the Brücke artists moved to Berlin, and the metropolis changed their art. From 1913 Kirchner painted his famous street scenes: elegant women and men on Potsdamer Platz, angular, hurried and seductive, the buildings tilted and the colours toxic. The publisher and dealer Herwarth Walden launched the magazine Der Sturm in 1910 and in 1913 organised the First German Autumn Salon, a major survey of the European avant-garde. Brücke broke up in 1913 in a dispute over a chronicle of the group written by Kirchner.

The Blue Rider: colour as sound

In Munich, things took a different direction. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc broke away from the New Artists’ Association of Munich in 1911 after its jury rejected a large painting by Kandinsky. On 18 December 1911, the first exhibition by the editors of “Der Blaue Reiter” opened at the Galerie Thannhauser; the almanac of the same name followed in 1912. Gabriele Münter, August Macke and later Paul Klee belonged to the circle, and even the composer Arnold Schoenberg exhibited.

Where Brücke placed the human being and its drives at the centre, the Blue Rider sought the spiritual. In his treatise On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky compared colours to sounds, preparing his step into abstraction. Marc assigned colours fixed meanings: blue stood for the masculine and spiritual, yellow for the feminine, red for matter. His animals were meant to show a world purer than that of humans.

Vienna: bodies under strain

Independently, Vienna produced its own form of Expressionism. Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele showed bodies, faces and hands under psychological pressure: nervous, vulnerable and often unsparing. Schiele died of the Spanish flu in 1918, aged 28.

War and disillusion

The First World War ended the sense of new beginnings, a war many artists had at first even welcomed. August Macke was killed in September 1914, Franz Marc near Verdun in March 1916. Kirchner suffered a breakdown and withdrew to the Swiss mountains near Davos.

After the war, Expressionism turned from shock into style. It shaped theatre, literature, architecture and film: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari of 1920 translated distorted spaces into painted sets with slanting walls and jagged shadows. At the same time, a counter-movement took shape. The 1925 exhibition “New Objectivity” in Mannheim showed a sober, cool kind of painting and marked the end of the Expressionist era.

“Degenerate”

For the Nazis, Expressionism became an enemy image. In 1937 they confiscated thousands of works of modern art from German museums. On 19 July 1937, the propaganda exhibition “Degenerate Art” opened in Munich, ridiculing works by Kirchner, Nolde, Marc, Kandinsky and many others. Kirchner, deeply shaken, took his own life in Davos in 1938.

The case of Emil Nolde is more complicated. He was a member of the Nazi party, made antisemitic statements and long hoped for recognition from the regime, even though his works were deemed “degenerate”. After 1945 he cast himself as a persecuted artist who had secretly created “unpainted pictures”. The legend persisted for decades. Only the 2019 exhibition “Emil Nolde: A German Legend” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, drawing on new sources, presented an unvarnished picture.

Afterlife

After 1945, Expressionism was rehabilitated in West Germany and became a symbol of the modernism that had been outlawed. The first documenta in Kassel in 1955 gave it a prominent place. In 1967 the Brücke-Museum opened in Berlin on the initiative of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Around 1980, the “Neue Wilde” and painters such as Georg Baselitz revived the vehement, gestural manner as Neo-Expressionism.

Expressionism still resonates through a question it was the first to pose so radically: should art depict the world, or the inner life of the person looking at it?