In 1920 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner noted in his diary: “MARC is out of the question at all. Kitsch á la KANDINSKY. How little do art historians need to see or feel to be able to look at it at all.” No, the German Expressionists had never really formed a unit. Kirchner was that Primus inter pares Among the painters of the Dresden artist group “Die Brücke” was Franz Marc, who was fatally struck by a shrapnel as a soldier near Verdun in 1916, with Wassily Kandinsky, founder of the Munich “Blue Rider”.
When Kirchner made the unflattering entry, the heyday of German Expressionism, at least in painting, was already over: From 1905 to 1914, from the foundation of the “Brücke” to the outbreak of the First World War, this revolutionary, multifaceted trend in the Art flickered. How extremely different the approach of nominal expressionists like Marc and Kirchner was can already be seen in the first room of the exhibition “Brücke und Blauer Reiter” in the Von-der-Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: “Erich Heckel and Dodo in the studio” (1910/11).
(Photo: Chemnitz Art Collections – Gunzenhauser Museum, property of the Gunzenhauser Foundation)
It is the first joint show between these two groups in a quarter of a century. 160 main works, 90 paintings and 70 works on paper can be seen. The Von-der-Heydt-Museum contributed around half of the exhibits from its immense collection. The other half comes from the holdings of the Buchheim Museum in Bernried am Starnberger See and the Chemnitz art collections, as well as other lenders. The cooperation with Bernried and Chemnitz is the first such cooperation, and the result is terrific.
“Expressionism” is hardly an umbrella term for the stylistic diversity
Especially the radicalism of Franz Marc, whose blue horses and yellow cows are now used as decoration on posters and which probably brought him the kitsch accusation of his colleague Kirchner, this radicalism can be brought to mind again in the context of the show. His departure from an anthropocentric worldview, the endeavor to depict things and creatures as the artist imagines them to be, becomes particularly clear when compared with Kirchner: Marc’s “Nude with Cat” from 1910, one woman the one milk-fed yellow cat, round and soft, resting in itself, is at one end of the atmospheric scale. Kirchner’s watercolor of the same title from 1918 is at the other, as it were wicked, end: the gray-white, crouched figure looks at the viewer with a challenging smile, while a black cat, apparently ready to jump, stares between her splayed thighs.
In view of the abundance of material, it is particularly clear that “expressionism” as a generic term does not adequately capture the stylistic diversity of all these artists. Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Mueller, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde within the bridge, Marc, Kandinsky, the often unjustifiably neglected Marianne von Werefkin, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee at the Blauer Reiter develop a richness of styles that break any conceptual bracket. Not only do the differences between the aesthetic approaches of the Brücke and the Blauer Reiter become visible – quite apart from symbolists like Alfred Kubin, solitaires like Klee and equally important and problematic figures like Nolde – but also the breakpoints within the groups.
Wassily Kandinsky’s “Improvisation Deluge” from 1913
(Photo: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich)
This applies in particular to the Blauer Reiter, which was not an artist community, but an umbrella term for journalists. It comprised the curatorial work of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky and also gave his name to the almanac they edited. The Blue Rider owed its existence to the rejection of the more conservative forces within the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, from which Kandinsky and Marc had moved further and further. While Münter’s early work and Kandinsky’s early work, for example, still shows great similarities in palette and color structure, the long-term life partners are noticeably diverging: Münter’s gesture is reduced, while Kandinsky’s endeavors to work “synaesthetically” in grandiose, multiple-overmolded abstractions such as the ” Improvisation Sintflut “from 1913 ends.
The more gripping, supposedly more homogeneous style of the Brücke painters, the allusions to so-called “primitivism”, to Cézanne, Matisse and Gauguin, was for a long time regarded as a conscious step, as a dissolution of the individual artistic personalities in a group aesthetic. Von der Heydt director and co-curator Roland Mönig sees this as a development that resulted organically from the close cooperation and the shared philosophical approach. The numerous bathing scenes, mostly created around Dresden, the reduced figure drawing and the general escapism in a libertine group life – with female models that are questionable not only by today’s standards – amalgamated the group stylistically.
They dreamed of the awakening of mankind, of the South Seas and of war
Expressionism dreamed of a universal upheaval, the overcoming of the logos, a new human development, which definitely included orientalist escapes or South Sea fantasies in the succession of Gauguin (the Nigerian artist and art historian Frank Ugiomoh contributed a chapter worth reading in the catalog on the subject of primitivism and colonialism). The world war appeared as the longed-for catalyst. Marc believed, like so many European intellectuals, that “sick” Europe would “heal” from this conflict. It was only two years after the outbreak of war and shortly before his death that he noted: “The world is richer by the bloodiest of its many thousand years of existence.”
The complexity of the expressionists’ perception results not least from this historical context of their work and the later development of those who, unlike Marc and August Macke, survived the First World War – emigrated like the Russian citizen Kandinsky or, despite the ostracism of his work as “degenerate art”, turned into a Nazi like Nolde. In Wuppertal, Expressionism proves its great and fascinating heterogeneity, which manifested itself in the work of the Brücke and the Blauer Reiter during their short heyday.
Bridge and Blue Rider. Von-der-Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. Until February 27th. Then in the art collections in Chemnitz and in the Buchheim Museum, Bernried. The catalog costs 34 euros.