Expressionism Preview Clip

Expressionism is the art of the emotive, the art of tension provoked by consciousness of the forces which surround modern humankind. The inevitability of world war, the rise of industrialization, the new power of capitalism - all these things weighed on men's minds at the beginning of the century, especially in Germany. Around 1906, in Dresden, a group of artists, known as Die Brücke, developed Expressionism. Its founders had their ancestors: Van Gogh who, according to the view expressed here, fought with his landscapes and his various pictorial subjects to get them to 'express' his feelings; James Ensor, who mocked those things which would stop him from living - society and his own death; Edvard Munch, who tried to cope with the difficulties and torments that faced his existence. Expressionism was therefore to be a way of painting through suffering to cope better with the unhappiness which surrounds everyone. In Vienna, Kokoschka wanted his pictures to make the viewer empathize with the spirit of the subject; the purpose of a painting was not the object painted but the feeling and the impression it made on the person looking at it. The painters of Die Brücke - Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel - tried to find the primitive nature of man by living in a community and using the expressiveness of color. What counts is not so much their actual paintings and how they painted, but that which is perceived even though it is not formulated. War and all its horrors was to constrain these painters; they could not look away from it. Otto Dix and Georg Grosz forced themselves to depict Germany after the war: the invalids, the misery and the bourgeoisie they blamed for it all. They believed theirs was the 'new objectivity.' After them, Max Beckmann managed to transcend this reality - but what he painted in his allegorical works was the great fear which had taken over the world. The film also features the work of Klimt, Nolde, Meidner, the Blaue Reiter group and others. Part of the series The Adventure of Modern Art

The Roland Collection | May 1, 2008

Tags:. .century. .reality. .max. .writers. .suffering