Introduction to Digital Exhibitions

During the politically tense years leading up to the First World War, which broke out on July 28, 1914, modern artists in Europe sought to create artworks that could serve as visual models for a better society. They thought that the rapid industrialization and modernization of the nineteenth century had led to materialism and spiritual bankruptcy. Along with competition for economic and political influence on the European continent and in colonies near and far, these changes led to increasing animosity between European countries. Tensions between France and Germany ran especially high. Nevertheless, modern artists associated with the broad movement of Expressionism in these two countries engaged in rich artistic and cultural exchanges that furthered the rapid and varied development of modern art before, during and after WWI.

French Expressionism may sound like a misnomer, as the movement is so strongly associated with Germany in the United States today. However, the term was also used by the French Fauves, a loosely affiliated group of rebellious young artists who exhibited together from 1905-1907 under the unofficial leadership of Henri Matisse.[1] These artists, who also counted André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck among their ranks, had received their first dubious recognition at the Salon d’Automne of 1905. The critic Louis Vauxelles noted that their loosely painted, boldly colored canvases looked as if they had been painted by “fauves” or wild beasts. In Matisse’s 1908 essay “Notes of a Painter,” a culmination of his ideas from his short-lived Fauvist period, the artist stated his ultimate goal: “What I am after, above all, is expression.”[2] The art of the Fauves found strong resonance in Germany, particularly with the Expressionist artists’ groups The Bridge, founded in Dresden in 1905 and The Blue Rider, established in Munich in 1911.

The French Fauvists and the German Expressionists rejected classicizing academic art. Instead of complying with its rigid rules and restrictions, these young artists heralded individual subjectivity. In their art, they represented the world as they experienced and interpreted it as opposed to copying its outward appearance, as they believed the academic artists to have done. To this end, they simplified form and chose color for its intense emotional effects. Visible traces of their artistic processes—from sweeping brushstrokes to loosely rendered prints and drawings and roughly hewn wood sculptures—suggest that the works were produced in states of heightened emotion. The artists themselves often underscored the ways that their work could help viewers escape the everyday and achieve a state of heightened spiritual awareness, which they themselves supposedly achieved when creating their work. In this way, artists affiliated with Expressionism hoped to counter what they perceived as the materialism and superficiality of their age. With the outbreak of World War I, however, former Fauves and the Expressionists of the second generation began to address politics and social ills more directly. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the students’ essays trace the ways the Great War determined the course of modern art.

NATURE

The French Fauves and the German Expressionists shared a desire to retreat from modern life and to return to nature.  What is more, they believed non-Western peoples to be unspoiled by modernization, despite increasing contact with European technology through colonization. These modern artists thought that non-Western peoples who were unhindered by the strict rules of academic art were more in tune with nature and therefore more capable of direct artistic expression. In effect, they were thought to have lived as Europeans had before the onset of industrialization. For this reason, Expressionists also idealized rural peasants in Europe. The essays in the first thematic section address the Expressionist longing for simpler times as well as their tendency to appropriate the aesthetics of non-Western cultures in order to achieve greater expression. This broader modernist tendency, which is also characterizes the art of the French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin and Cubist Pablo Picasso, is referred to as primitivism.

In The Modern Bathers, Julia Curbera draws connections between Fauvist and Expressionist paintings and seventeenth-century Baroque and more recent modernist paintings of Arcadia, the ancient Greek and Roman ideal of mankind living in harmony with nature. While Curbera focuses on representations of a European golden age, Jenica Wang critically analyzes Expressionists’ representations of non-Western women in Primitivism: A Study of Cultural Appropriation. Meghan Gunn also takes up the subject in The Primitivist Nude in the Tradition of the Bridge, in which she examines the ways that artists employed seemingly rough or “primitive” artistic media and techniques.  Solomon Leyba’s Individuals as Archetypes also touches on the theme of primitivism. It traces the ways Expressionists often emphasized their own subjectivity over that of their sitters, and how this tendency could lead to generalizing and indeed stereotyping of sitters from outside of Europe.

URBANISM

Unlike the French Impressionists, who reveled in painting late nineteenth-century Parisian boulevards and entertainments, the Fauves and Expressionists generally disdained the modern city. On the one hand, their rejection of urbanism was a clear effort to distinguish themselves from the Impressionists, whose art they believed to be frivolous and superficial. On the other, these modern artists had to promote and sell their art in European metropolises such as Paris, Munich and Berlin. The two exhibitions in this section evaluate the ways Fauves and Expressionists navigated their distaste for urban life with the practical need to exhibit and sell art in the city.

In Independence in the City, Luke Sorensen weaves together biography, history and insightful visual analysis to account for the idiosyncratic ways artists represented Dresden and Berlin. Likewise, Shivani Mitra’s Life in Paris and Berlin in the Early 1900s examines German artists’ negative responses to Berlin before World War I. However, she counterbalances this gloomy theme with an analysis of the French artist Robert Delaunay’s buoyant and colorful canvas Eiffel Tower, 1924. Mitra argues convincingly that Delaunay, who had had close ties to The Blue Rider before WWI, harnesses that longstanding symbol of French culture and technology to celebrate French victory.

DISASTER

Whereas primitivism offered an escape from modern urban life, the onset of World War I led many artists to tackle politics and social ills head on. This is particularly true of Second-Generation Expressionists, such as Max Beckmann and Ludwig Meidner, both of whom gained widespread renown in the 1910s. Calvin Miceli-Nelson’s Beckmann’s Balance Board provides an apt transition from the theme of urbanism to disaster, as it spans the Independent Expressionist’s general disdain for the artifice of modern society as well as his artistic responses to war and National Socialism. Just as Beckmann’s work is a cornerstone of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection of modern art, the essays in the final section all highlight the artist’s personal responses to natural and political disasters.

In Apocalyptic Disasters in German Expressionist Art, Alison Frieder analyzes Expressionist reinterpretations of the Biblical Apocalypse in secular works created just before and after the First World War. The subject offers her ample opportunity to consider how Expressionist painting intersects with a range of other media, including artists’ writings, journalism and printmaking. Bowie Chen likewise draws upon artists’ accounts of their wartime experiences in World War I and Its Effects on Expressionist Aesthetic Direction. Chen’s subtle analysis ranges from Expressionist scenes of chaos and suffering to quieter and more conservative subjects.

Meera Toolsidas focuses on Expressionists’ wide-ranging responses to the onset of World War I and World War II in 20^th-Century Pessimism: Examining Emotion in Expressionist Portraiture. Toolsidas observes that Expressionists often turned to the traditional genre of portraiture in order to convey their individuality and emotions. At the same time, they tried to strike a balance between their own subjectivity and broader societal concerns. Yet when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, German Expressionists found themselves living in a society that tolerated neither individualism nor criticism. For this reason, the blockbuster “Degenerate Art Exhibition” held in Munich in 1937 as a counterpoint to the “Great German Art Exhibition” offered up Expressionism in particular for public ridicule. Thus, in Facing Despair: Expressionist Portraiture in Wartime, Gabriel Rubin elucidates how artists affiliated with Fauvism and Expressionism used portraiture and self-portraiture to reevaluate their precarious status as artists and as human beings at a time when their worst fears about modern society were being realized.

Disparaged in National Socialist Germany, Expressionists like Max Beckmann found acceptance and support in the United States. When Germany surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945, the U.S. emerged not only as a military victor but as a cultural one as well. After World War II, the global art capital moved from Paris to New York City. This was due in part to the fact that so many European modernists lived in exile in New York. However, institutions and collectors in cities like St. Louis also embraced Expressionists during and after WWII. Beckmann's professorship at the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis from 1947-9 and Morton D. May's world-class collection of Expressionism, which he bequeathed to the Saint Louis Art Museum, are just two examples. By showcasing collections in St. Louis, Nature-Urbanism-Disaster: The Expressionist Zeitgeist highlights this new page in the history of Expressionism.