Expressionism. Ashley Bassie

pre-war milieu: “The rather odd, quite eccentric and self-assured Schwabing, in whose streets anyone – be they a man or a woman… immediately stood out if they were without a palette, or a canvas, or at least without a portfolio… Everyone painted… or wrote poetry, or made music, or began to dance. You could find at least two ateliers under the roof in every house, where sometimes not exactly very much was painted, but a lot was always debated, disputed, philosophised and conscientiously drunk (which depended more on the state of one’s purse than on the state of one’s morals)”.

      Kandinsky tells a story, probably well-worn, that is revealing not only of Munich’s artists’ quarter, but of a whole dimension of the bohemian creed of “living” art: “What is Schwabing?” asks a Berliner visiting Munich. “It’s the northern district of the city” the local replies. “No way”, says another, “it’s a mental state”.

      There were many Russians, like Alexander Sakharov, captured in an extraordinary portrait by his friend Alexei von Jawlensky. The dancer visited the painter one evening before a performance, already made up and in costume, which created a particularly androgynous effect. Quickly and spontaneously – reportedly in less than half an hour – Jawlensky produced this free, vigorous and highly memorable image.

      At thirty, Kandinsky was a Russian who found himself in this milieu after leaving a promising career as an academic lawyer in Moscow. He headed for the artistic life in Munich in 1896, and quickly graduated from art student with the painter Franz von Stuck, to an important figure in the Munich avant-garde. He was a co-founder and president of the “Phalanx” school and exhibiting group (1901–1904) and of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists; Association of Munich) or NKVM in 1909. Through these activities he established a reputation as an effective organiser, and worked and exhibited together with many other Russian émigrés and German artists, including Gabriele Münter, who became his companion for the duration of his most formative years.

      Stylistically, Kandinsky and his colleagues began to push the boundaries of their painting in the late summer of 1908. Four of them – Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin – made a painting trip to the village of Murnau in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The following summer, Münter bought a house there. It soon became known as the “Russian House” and provided the base from which the couple and their artist friends painted Murnau and its surroundings in a series of colourful, ever more innovative canvases.

      Erich Heckel, Standing Child, 1911.

      Colour woodcut, 37.5 x 27.7 cm.

      Museum Folkwang, Essen.

      Alexej von Jawlensky, Portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sakharov, 1909.

      Oil on cardboard, 69.5 x 66.5 cm.

      Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

      Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) originated in a project conceived by Kandinsky and a younger colleague, Franz Marc, in 1911. They shared the desire to publish a new kind of periodical.

      Before it was published, they staged a rather hastily-assembled group exhibition, the “1. Ausstellung der Redaktion des Blauen Reiter” (1st Exhibition of the Editors of the Blue Rider) at Munich’s Thannhauser gallery (December 1911 – January 1912). It was a motley mix of works by Henri Rousseau, Kandinsky, August Macke, Marc, Münter, the composer Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Delaunay among others. It went on to Berlin, where Herwarth Walden added works by Klee, Kubin, Jawlensky and Werefkin, before showing it as the first Sturm exhibition. A second Blaue Reiter exhibition, of international graphic works – including Picasso and the Russian Malevich – was staged almost immediately, in March and April 1912, at Hans Goltz’s gallery.

      Of the planned periodical, only one issue appeared, in 1912, but it is arguably the most important single document of pre-war Expressionism: the Blaue Reiter Almanac. On one level it is a kind of sourcebook for artists of texts and images. However, taken as a whole, it can be read as an entire argument for a radical revision of art and how we look at it. Looking back, writing in 1930, Kandinsky described the motivation behind the Blaue Reiter project:

      “It was at that time that my wish matured to assemble a book (a kind of almanac) in which artists would be the only authors. I dreamt primarily of painters and musicians. The ruinous separation of the arts from one another and, furthermore, of ‘Art’ from folk art and children’s art, from ‘Ethnography,’ the solid walls between phenomena that were, in my eyes, so closely related, often even identical: in a word the synthesis left me no peace”.

      The almanac contains reproductions of paintings and graphic works by artists from El Greco to Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, the Douanier Rousseau, the Brücke colleagues Kirchner and Heckel, the Blaue Reiter artists and others are juxtaposed with objects and images from Latin America, Alaska, Japan and Africa. There are medieval woodcuts, carvings and tapestries, Bavarian glass paintings, Egyptian shadow figures and children’s drawings. Even leaving aside the texts and music scores in the almanac, the volume is like a cabinet of curiosities, a trove of images combined in ways that are suggestive of unexpected relationships.

      The name Der Blaue Reiter is related to a recurrent motif in Kandinsky’s paintings from his Munich period; a rider on horseback. A mounted rider also appears with striking frequency among the objects and images reproduced in the almanac. The colour blue was cherished by both Kandinsky and Marc, who believed that it had a particularly “spiritual” quality.

      The artists who were associated with the Blaue Reiter name in 1911 and 1912 by inclusion in their exhibitions and almanac, were numerous. Today, the term is usually used to refer to a smaller group, chiefly Kandinsky, Marc, Münter, Jawlensky, Werefkin, Klee and Macke. These last two enjoyed a particularly creative friendship for a short time before the war, travelling to Tunisia together. The Blaue Reiter circle included some very close friends, but they were less a “group” than the Brücke had been in 1910, for example. Their styles, subjects and theoretical concerns were much more diverse. They did not always agree on fundamental issues – particularly around the nature and role of the “spiritual” in art, yet this milieu proved one of the most fertile of the pre-war Expressionist era.

      Max Pechstein, Seated Girl, 1910.

      Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 cm.

      Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

      THE BODY AND NATURE

      Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Girl under a Japanese Parasol, 1909.

      Oil on canvas, 92 x 80 cm.

      Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

      This chapter examines the central importance, in many Expressionist works, of the relationship between man / woman and nature. The nude played a pivotal role in the Brücke’s practice, where it was often an idealised symbol of moral, physical and sexual liberation. The body and sexuality was differently cast in other Expressionist contexts, as further chapters will explore.

      Expressionism is often subject to cliché and misunderstanding. It has sometimes been dismissed as an aberrant detour in the onwards march of European modernism. The influential American critic Clement Greenberg felt, for example, that Kandinsky’s work suffered as a result of the context from which it emerged: “Picasso’s good luck was to have come to French modernism directly, without the intervention of any other kind of modernism. It was perhaps Kandinsky’s bad luck to have had to go through German modernism first”. At other times Expressionism has been over-dramatised as an irrational manifestation of a peculiarly Teutonic neurosis. More accurately, it has been described in terms of a “cultivated rebellion”. In order to understand the many forms Expressionism took in Dresden, Berlin, Munich, Vienna and numerous provincial outposts, it is useful to grasp what it was rebelling against.

      In common with much