Maly Gerhardus

This book, featuring 80 color plates, focuses on Expressionism from the early 20th century, accompanied by brief notes that explain the artwork. In an Introduction, the authors explain that the term “Expressionism” did not gain currency until after the 22nd Berlin Secession Exhibition in 1911, and was used at first to describe “everything within the European avant-garde that could not be classified as impressionism. Later, it was reserved almost exclusively for German art. But the term had a short life, they report: its artistic achievements were all essentially concentrated between 1905 and the First World War. The authors go into some detail about what the term meant to the artists who were characterized by it. In addition to a distinctive style, those claiming adherence to it believed in a community involving both their art and their lifestyles in general, often sharing studios and materials. This methodology was perhaps more helpful in defining the movement than elements of its style.

They do make an attempt, however, at limning distinctive features of Expressionism. First, they write, painting was not at all used in a political sense. Expressionist pictures shares common elements, dominated by two-figure compositions. They tended to have an “uncouth and unruly style.” They created objects that came to exist in and through color, often composing pictures only of elements and fragments, evincing a previously unknown freedom of form.

The authors mention other aspects of Expressionism, but the best way to understand what it meant is to study the pictures themselves.

Artists shown include Max Bechmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Franz Marc, and Emil Nolde, inter alia.

The artwork of this period and in this style is distinctive and fascinating, although I didn’t get a good sense of how to define it from the Introduction. Nevertheless, it is a book worth perusing for the plates along.… (mais)

This book, featuring 73 color plates, focuses on “stylistic art” from the end of the 19th and early 20th century.

In an Introduction, the authors point out that art in this genre attempted to “transport the observer into another world, which can be so far removed from the one familiar to him that, at first glance, he is unable to gauge the gulf separating the two.” Above all, the authors aver, the works raise the question of just what the artists were trying to depict. The brief notes accompanying each of the illustrations suggest some answers.

Most of the art in this category came from new developments and schools of art in London, Brussels, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Darmstadt, and Berlin. The authors, maintaining that much of it arose in opposition to the rise of technology at the time, review a lot of the “isms” roiling the art scene at the time, such as symbolism, idealism, eclecticism, and spiritualism. “Stylist Art,” they write, was a way of counteracting the “increasingly prevalent tendency to deny any place in men’s lives to the exercise of phantasy or to the use of all one’s senses in a full-bodied and imaginative response to the world.”

The art featured, because of its departure from realism, fascinates the imagination of the observer. They include such artists as William Blake, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Henri Matisse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Egon Schiele.

I became familiar with much of the art included in this book from posters in college dorm rooms. It is the type of art that appeals greatly to minds when at their most fertile and dreams most aspirational.… (mais)