Foreword and Acknowledgements

The digital exhibition catalogue Nature-Urbanism-Disaster: The Expressionist Zeitgeist is timely in several ways. First, it establishes a dialogue with the countless exhibitions and publications that marked the centennial of the outbreak of World War I in 2014. Second, in our increasingly globalized society, art historians have begun to consider modern art not as a series of isolated styles, but as interconnected movements linked by artists, collectors, dealers, museums and publications. In 2014, the exhibition “Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky,” organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Kunsthaus Zürich in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, synthesized and augmented recent French and German scholarship on the close ties between Fauvism and Expressionism.[i]  The organizers highlighted works from Saint Louis: two paintings from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum were featured in the Los Angeles and Montreal shows: Henri Matisse’s Still Life with Oranges II, c. 1899, and Lionel Feininger’s Bridge I, 1913, The Saint Louis Art Museum’s Landscape with Cows, Sailing Boat and Figures, 1914, by August Macke was shown at those venues as well.

Curator Simon Kelly’s galleries of modern art at the Saint Louis Art Museum likewise emphasize the ties between French and German art in the early twentieth century as opposed to dividing the works into separate displays along national lines. Newly installed to commemorate the opening of the new wing by Sir David Chipperfield in 2013, thematic galleries such as “The Modern Body” allow viewers to understand works like Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle, 1908, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Portrait of a Woman, 1911, in dialogue with one another.

Perhaps the boldest move in the rehanging of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s galleries was to take down the grand European portraits and landscapes from the Museum’s imposing Great Hall and to devote it instead to the work of Independent Expressionist Max Beckmann. Thanks to the savvy collecting of Saint Louis businessman Morton D. May, who bequeathed over one hundred works of German Expressionism to the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1983, the Saint Louis Art Museum holds the largest collection of Beckmann’s paintings in the world.[ii] Beckmann also had ties to Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as a visiting professor of painting at what was then the School of Fine Arts from 1947-9. By featuring Beckmann’s art in this most prominent exhibition space, Kelly and his colleagues assert that Expressionism is a central component of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection. In anticipation of these changes, the Museum also appointed scholar of German Expressionism Lynette Roth as Mellon Fellow to write Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings, which was published by Prestel in June 2015.

The recent exhibition “Expressionism in Germany and France” and the rehanging of the galleries of modern art at the Saint Louis Art Museum provided points of departure for “Nature-Urbanism-Disaster: The Expressionist Zeitgeist.” Since the most recent catalogue of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s German Expressionist art was published in 1985, the exhibition at hand offers fresh and timely insights, both through the course’s international focus and the students’ own academic interests.[iii] For example, History major Gabriel Rubin considers how French and German Expressionists responded to the rise of National Socialism in the highly subjective genre of portraiture in Facing Despair: Expressionist Portraiture in Wartime. Solomon Leyba, a double major in Art History and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology, reveals that Expressionists often emphasized their own psychology over that of their sitters in Individuals as Archetypes. Beckmann’s Balance Board reflects Painting major Calvin Miceli-Nelson’s own highly conceptual artistic project.

The student curators’ mini-exhibitions are grounded in the close observation of original works of art at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Over the course of the semester, the class visited both museums on multiple occasions and was supported by numerous individuals. It is my pleasure to acknowledge their kind assistance here. Simon Kelly, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, met the students in the galleries to discuss curatorial strategies. His expertise helped lay a strong foundation for the overall exhibition project. Ann Maree Walker, Research Assistant in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, also helped organize a visit to view original prints and drawings by the Fauves and Expressionists in the Study Room, during which she shared her extensive knowledge about printmaking. At the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Assistant Registrar Kimberly Broker also made original works of art by modern European artists available to the class for study. Special thanks to Jennifer Akins, Subject Librarian for Art and Architecture, for aiding students in their scholarly research. In addition, Akins coordinated a workshop on primary sources on early twentieth-century European art in Special Collections at Washington University Libraries. On the technical side, Shannon Davis, Digital Library Services Manager at Olin Library and Betha Whitlow, Curator of Visual Resources, helped realize the exhibition on Omeka, Washington University’s online exhibition platform. All of these people enriched the exhibition and the course immeasurably.

Sarah McGavran, Ph.D., St. Louis, Missouri, June 2015