Between 1900 and 1933 Expressionist artists created some of the most dramatic and enduring images of the twentieth century. This volume brings together the thoughts and aspirations of the individuals who brought about this revolutionary epoch in the visual arts. It offers readers the opportunity to engage at firsthand with key writings by the most significant artists of the Expressionist era.
"An indispensable anthology that immediately renders its predecessors obsolete. With its gathering of public and private documents, it carries us through the rise and fall of one of the great upheavals of modern art."—Robert Rosenblum, New York University "These essays, including many previously unavailable in English, are rich with startling new insights into the German Expressionist psyche. Elucidating the artists' view of government, the role of women in modern society, and their own ambivalence about the effectiveness of abstract art, this anthology is essential reading for all scholars and students of twentieth-century art."—Joan Marter, author of Alexander Calder
Primitivism versus modernity: the expressionist dilemma - Politics of primitivism - Brucke bathers: back to nature - Max Pechstein's visionary ideas - Emil Nolded.
This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today.
In the early years of the 20th century, a group of young artists including Ernst Kirchner, Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, liberated themselves from traditional representation by using distortion and vibrant, unrealistic colour in their painting. Eroticism became a tool for exposing the lies and decadence of society, whilst motifs borrowed from African, Oceanic and Buddhist art further questioned bourgeois culture. Later, the cruelty of World War I was reflected violently in the work of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz.
This book reads messianic expectation as the defining characteristic of German culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. It has long been accepted that the Expressionist movement in Germany was infused with a thoroughly messianic strain. Here, with unprecedented detail and focus, that strain is traced through the work of four important Expressionist playwrights: Ernst Barlach, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller and Franz Werfel. Moreover, these dramatists are brought into new and sustained dialogues with the theorists and philosophers of messianism who were their contemporaries: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem. In arguing, for example, that concepts like Bloch’s utopian self-encounter (Selbstbegegnung) and Benjamin’s messianic now-time (Jetztzeit) reappear as the framework for Expressionism’s staging of collective redemption in a new age, Anderson forges a previously underappreciated link in the study of Central European thought in the early twentieth century.
Published in 1957, German Expressionist Painting was the first comprehensive study of one of the most pivotal movements in the art of this century. When it was written, however, German Expressionism seemed like an eccentric manifestation far removed from what was then considered the mainstream of modern art. But as historians well know, each generation alters the concept of mainstream to encompass those aspects of the past which seem most relevant to the present. The impact of German Expressionism on the art and thought of later generations could never have been anticipated at the time of the original writing of this book. During the subsequent years an enormous body of scholarly research and an even larger number of popular books on German expressionist art has been printed. Numerous monographs and detailed studies on most of the artists exist now and countless exhibitions with accompanying catalogues have taken place. Much of this new research could have been incorporated in a revised edition and the bibliography certainly could have been greatly expanded to include the important writings which have been published in Germany, the United States and elsewhere since this book was originally issued. The author, however, was faced with the choice of reprinting the original text with only the most necessary alterations-such as updating the captions to indicate present locations of the paintings-or the preparation of a revised text and bibliography. Desirable as a revision appeared, present printing costs would have priced the paperback out of reach for students. It is for this reason that I decided to reissue the original text which stands on its own as a primary investigation of German Expressionist Painting.
