Expressionism (pt. 7)

German Expressionism would become famous for bellicose intensity in depicting bleak and often violent subject matter.  Alongside Germany's entrance into the First World War, this heightened emotionalism permeates geopolitical meaning, but the style of art continually draws back onto the artist, who is personally expressing him or herself through art.

Käthe Kollwitz painted, illustrated, and sculpted works of art that conveyed profound human emotion.  These works expressed the feelings of much of the population during wartime, but they also communicated subjects which were very personal to the artist.  She lost her son to the war and fell into a deep depression.  Death and the Mother is today considered one of her most famous lithographs conveying her personal sense of loss.

Again very primal, like Munch's The Scream, Death and the Mother is a simple etching of a crude woman, unclothed, holding a baby to her chest.  She is gripping her child tightly and covering its mouth to protect it from an encroaching form coming up from behind her.  A skeleton, ghost, demon, or simply skinny human being—whatever it is coming up behind her (the artist has labeled it Death), Death creeps up with its face pressed against the mother's in ravenous assail, and the mother widens her eyes and gasps in fear.  She is about to be separated from her child, and her muscles flex and tighten around her precious infant; but nothing can stop Death from approaching.  The tone in this Expressionist work conveys overwhelming emotion, but it accomplishes potency and profundity through simplicity.  This is just a simple drawing but no less full of powerful emotion, like the simple telegram which can change a mother's life forever during wartime.

Inasmuch as Death and the Mother was an expression of Kollwitz's own grief over the loss of her son, this was the sentiment of a generation of suffering poor who lost more than their financial stability from the war.  World War I left the entire Western world in devastation.  Chemical warfare, trench warfare, mechanized warfare—this had been a war like none other before in the history of the world.  It had introduced new technology, like the armored tank, submachine gun, and the flamethrower (just to name a few), which promised to make war more humane but delivered quite a different result.  If the artists of the late Victorian Era had found life in the Modern world demoralizing and bleak, then this experience of Modern war did nothing if not solidify their doubts.  International in scale, brutal in execution, and everlasting in aftermath, the First World War was a phenomenon that stayed with its generation long after it was over.  The effects of mustard gas and the diseases contracted as a result of trench conditions led to continuing massacre and decimation.  The influenza pandemic of 1918 alone wiped out approximately 20 to 40 million people (this statistic comes from Stanford University's virology website).  Untold masses of other veterans who were fortunate enough to survive the war without illness nonetheless suffered from severe post-traumatic stress and depression after their time on the battlefield.  The result was total devastation, not just literal or physical but psychological and emotional.

These events had a profound—incalculably profound—effect on artists of this generation.  It's difficult to approach the topic in one or two paragraphs; libraries could be filled with this type of analysis.  Suffice it to say, the war changed everything.  As we saw from late Victorian industrialism, this gloomy outlook on Modern life was already developing prominently among the literary and artistic circles in Europe and America; the "Great War" cemented this growing hopelessness.  An entire group of artists (mostly within the literary world) even gave up, effectively denouncing the world as unsalvageable, and fled to Paris to isolate themselves.  These "Lost Generation" writers (as they later became known) included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot.

Expressionism (pt. 6)

In the case of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Expressionist artwork could be about distinguishing the artist apart from the crowd.  In this painting, titled Street, Berlin, from 1913, the artist creates a highly caricaturized vision of the public crowd.

Elaborately dressed aristocrats step center stage onto a variant of a "rolling-out-the-red-carpet" event.  Shades of purple, black, and white convey a royal status of high-class social elites, as if to assert that these are the most prominent among the members of the public sphere.  But Kirchner has painted the scene with tension.  Behind the glitz and glamour of the rich is an artificial elegance that reveals itself to be quite flat.  What at one glance is a group of lively, wealthy, and exciting people is at another glance a bunch of stick figures painted two-dimensionally on a canvas.  From their pointy feet to their stick-skinny hands, these figures are anything but full (like the apples in Cézanne's still life).  Their fickle joviality is here mocked and satirized, instead of painted honestly through the Impressionistic lens of realism.  The two women in the foreground are identified as prostitutes and the men behind her, who are barely given distinguishable facial features, are characterized almost as animals.  In decadent society, Kirchner's painting seems to suggest, it's the only way in which one sees other people.  Conveying the stylishness of the contemporary culture, the artist adds a dark tone of portentous ill-omen that would foreshadow World War I.

Expressionism (pt. 5)

A developing Norwegian painter who moved to Paris and then Berlin, Edvard Munch laid the foundation for German Expressionism.  His art was considered grotesque in comparison to earlier Impressionist works.  He painted like Van Gogh, depicting how he felt about subjects instead of how he saw them; but Munch didn't so much turn to subjects like beautiful landscapes with cypress trees or the pretty night sky of Southern France.  A troubled man himself, Munch painted dark subjects with more overt intensity.  Similar to the Symbolists, he painted abstract qualities of the human experience, but his work is primarily Expressionistic because his perspectives are not third-person in topical approach.  The artist paints as one inside the scene, feeling the emotion or suffering the illness.  And the emotion in The Scream is: fear.

This Expressionist work shows the world through the eyes of people in intense anguish.  We are standing either on a dock or the deck of a ship; it is not entirely clear from the image.  This unfamiliarity with our present surroundings suits the subject; in fear we often feel thrown into an environment which we do not feel fully comfortable with or even fully cognizant of.  We're lost, and in this painting we are in no friendly place.  Fiery oranges and reds top the entire scene in swirly, lava-like flows of threatening color and menacing form.  The ocean swirls in tempestuous violence.  Near the horizon line the ocean even seems to have funneled into a maelstrom with two helpless ships about to be swallowed in it.  Everything in the painting appears unstable and shaky with curved lines and erratic brushstrokes.  (Compare the swirly forms of this scene with the night sky of Van Gogh's Starry Night).  In the direct middle of the scene (targeted, almost, in the dead center of the frame), is a frail and terrified person who appears to be crumbling away, like a ghost, and is screaming with his or her hands up at his or her face (the figure is sexless).  Its bald head communicates a sensitive mind that is undergoing severe psychological trauma, and its black clothing symbolizes its mortality and condemnation.  The shape of the person's head even looks like a skull, doesn't it?  The fear being conveyed here is very raw and primal in manifestation in similar fashion to how the painting itself is stripped from realism and balance.  The only straight lines we see are those of the fence and wooden platform in the foreground, as well as the two people walking away off to the left-hand side of the frame; but this is no more encouraging than the rest.  The pair of bystanders is walking away, when they could be helping our poor, helpless, unidentified subject screaming in the foreground.  Perhaps they can't even hear that individual's screams.  (Have you ever had those dreams where you try to talk or yell, but no sound comes out or the people can't hear you?)  And the planks of wood ominously receding back into the distance only seem to provide a stronghold for death, leading to no safe place but instead stretching off to the side and into the Unknown, outside of the painting.  They drag on and further isolate the center figure from anyone who can be of help, from the rest of the whole world, even.  This bears implications not just to the painting's own subject matter but for the work's placement within the developing state of art at this time.  Impressionism sought a connection with the Modern world; that the painter of Modern life was a person of the crowd, within the circle of the public sphere.  Here we see the radical opposite of that.  In the works of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, the artist is someone totally separated from the rest of the world.  In The Night Café, The Scream, the Portrait of Dr. Gachet, etc., we can see references to isolation and social exile.  The Expressionist artist, therefore, turns inward—not to the crowd, not to the world, but to himself.

Expressionism (pt. 4)

One of the most famous offshoots of Expressionism was German Expressionism, which not only focused on a specific nationality of artists but dealt with consistent cultural approaches to subject matter.  Significantly in music, this style of approach manifested itself prodigiously in the works of composer Arnold Schoenberg.  The theoretical tenants of German Expressionism did away with traditions and conventions in art in order to better convey deeper emotion.

The paintings of artist Franz Marc, then, are not Impressionistic, though the wispy brushwork resembles the earlier styles of Renoir.  His colors, which are more vivid and unrestrained, represent the flare of emotional life to be read into his work.  The artist frequently painted horses, but he painted them in different colors, like yellow or blue.  This painting of Yellow Horses is one of his most famous works of art.  The majestic beauty and pastoral tranquility of these noble beasts is conveyed through broad brushstrokes and wide circles of vivid hues, similar to the weighty look of the fruit in Cézanne's Still Life with a Peppermint Bottle.  The yellow of their bodies receives proper shading and reflective light (in greens along the mane and legs), but they are nevertheless painted very simply, almost as mere blotches of color.  Expressionism, while trying to convey often the deepest of emotions, sought to simplify the subject matter in a work so as not to distract or deter both viewer and artist from the real aspects of the work which were to be stressed.  Photorealism was too sharp a style for a phenomenon like Expressionism, given not just that emotions are abstract but that painting itself is not a concrete art.  Oils applied to canvases denote a form of technique, but the accomplishment of a painter lies in something far less tangible than clearly defined physical or visual elements.  Marc's horses appear in their own world, with clouds in the background and mystical, rolling blues and pinks.  We are almost in a fairy world, but we can't be sure; the horses in the foreground are all that matter.

Franz Marc most often painted nature scenes with animals, as if to connect with the old, Romantic affinity for nature's sublimity and peace.  Not all Expressionism was about personal self-expression (like Matisse's paper cutouts), but certainly the movement allowed for greater freedom among painters to paint how they felt about their given subject.  Horses and nature, thought this artist, ought to be painted with the fervor of old Romanticism.  Marc didn't paint in a Modernist way but in fact revered the later paintings of Vincent Van Gogh.  As the onset of war grew nearer, however, the artist did adapt his subjects to the times in a way that brought more undertones of impending death into his scenes.  The peace was lost.  After Germany declared war on Russia in 1914, Franz Marc enlisted in the military and was later killed in battle.  He died just shortly after his 36^th birthday.

Expressionism (pt. 3)

Expressionism concerns itself with subjectivity and the emotional experiences of subjects rather than their physical appearances.  The art style does not necessarily lead to self-expression, though that is its most common form (and probably the most popular).  In the case of Henri Matisse, art took on the specific role of expressing oneself.  As a form of heightened Impressionism, the artist now employs him or herself in portraying his or her own metaphysical qualities, like giving an impression of oneself.  The subject is the artist; the art is open unto itself, metacritical.  When Matisse arrived at a new technique to build his style off of, paper cutouts, he indicated it as a fulfillment of his endeavors as an artist.  "Finally," he said, "I have found the most direct way to express myself—the paper cutout."

This is one of his more famous cutout artworks, from 1947, titled Icarus.  The artist has cut out pieces of colored paper and pasted them onto a surface, which was then printed.  This is what makes the edges so sharp and the jet-ink colors so stark.  We see a black silhouette against a deep blue sky with yellow flashes all around.  Given the artwork's title, after the mythological character who flew too close to the sun, we can suppose that the figure in this work is flying or floating in the air, and that the yellow spots around him are stars.  These stars are quite expressively fashioned, like Van Gogh's in Starry Night, each one unique and seemingly full of organic life and energy.  Icarus's arms look more like birds' wings, which appropriately references the story of the Ancient Greek character, and his heavy legs, disproportionately large to the rest of his body, appear to be weighing him down.  The black figure remains otherwise totally anonymous and undistinguished—but Matisse has placed a tiny, red dot inside the silhouette's chest area, indicating a heart.  Perhaps that small circle of color alone, no matter how small, makes him more vibrant and alive than all the other flashing stars combined.

Referencing Ancient Greek mythology and invoking complex ideas of the struggle of humanity to soar above earthly restraints, this work of art becomes increasingly elusive the further one goes into studying it; but the artist has first and foremost created a simple image, of mere paper cutouts, to more directly convey the most bare and universally communicable messages to the viewer.  We see a human form, black, against a colorful background.  The human has no color, but inside him is a heart that has the richest color of the whole canvas.  This is about self-expression and a quasi-Romantic return to the emotional reverence of the nobly naturalistic heart of mankind.  Through simple forms more complicated and deeper emotions can be conveyed without getting lost in too much subject matter, too many colors and shapes and all other manner of painting elements.  This work pre-dates Minimalism.

Matisse's later works of paper cutout art was what the artist most identified himself with, stating that it was the culmination of his artistic career.  Therefore, we can't talk about Matisse without bringing up paper cutouts; however, those came much later, and we're getting out of our chronology here.  We must come back to the Expressionist painters at the early 20^th century.

Expressionism (pt. 2)

Concerned with design and aesthetics (which, we must remember, is wholly loyal to the medium of art), Matisse painted with specificity of attention.  What he found really important in his artworks around this time was color.  This painting, entitled Open Window, he produced in 1905.

We are looking at an open window, with two panels on either side and an assortment of potted plants on the pane below, which opens out onto a seaside landscape.  This is very similar to Morisot's painting of her husband Eugène looking out of a window onto a harbor.  Here we can distinguish the images of boats at a dock, but they do not look realistic at all.  For one thing, they are not the right color.  The artist is utilizing his freedom of independent expression to embody subjects with new light, or at least with the unique light of the artist's own eye.  But the boats (along with everything else in the painting) are also conceived very simply on the canvas, with a single slide of the artist's brush to account for the mast and a few more crude dabs of color to fill in the rest of the boat.  The potted plants are mere dots of color speckled randomly in the frame of the window.  This is hardly Impressionistic; it's too extreme.  Critics were shocked by the simplicity and unrealistic qualities of Matisse's paintings, but the artist used simplicity because he wanted a more direct form of expression.  Too much form would have distracted from the colors, and Matisse's colors are the heart of his painting style at this point in his artistic career.  Later on, however, the artist turned to different techniques.

Expressionism (pt. 1)

After the Post-Impressionists, a group of French painters, led by Henri Matisse, rose to the scene by about 1905.  These artists called themselves Fauves, which literally translates to "Wild Beasts."  These Impressionistically trained artists took Van Gogh's ideas of colors, movement, and design, and made a style that was unrealistic, free, and wild.  Fauvism takes direct inspiration from the later works of Van Gogh and is usually considered as a branch of Expressionism, an art style that conveyed personal emotion over objective subject matter.

Matisse, like Van Gogh, began painting realistically according to the tradition of art developed during the Victorian Period, but he was mainly interested in design, not lifelike images.  With all the possibilities of art opening up at the close of the 19^th century, the new millennium saw the outpouring of radically unique styles from all sorts of different angles or viewpoints.  For Matisse, paintings did not need to convey realistic-looking shapes or colors to convey the feelings or aesthetic qualities of a given subject.  He made use of flattened, arranged patches of color, almost like Cézanne's later work, and did away with unnecessary details.  One gets a good example of this technical form in the artist's painting of a Woman with a Hat.

Remembering the explosion of color thrown into Van Gogh's paintings and even the Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin, we can see here the approach to color taken to an utmost extremity.  Hardly anything is painted in its proper hue, except maybe the woman's eyes.  Everything is painted with an unpredictable overflow of artistic independence and creative license.  The woman is the artist's wife, and Henri Matisse has spared no expense at infusing his wife's image with as much characteristic flare as possible.  How else could a painting be able to convey the breadth of human personality?  How else can one truly recreate a proper image of someone so expressive and so full of life?  Matisse's painting is almost trying to escape from itself through vibrant colors; they vividly radiate off the canvas and burst out of the frame with activity and energy.