![]() Images produced in wood had to be forcibly excised from the tough surface of the block, echoing the artist’s extraction and expression of his inner emotional response. Preferred especially by Kandinsky and the Brücke group, the woodcut offered a medium that in every element of its production reflected the ethos of the Expressionist movement. 'Der Hirte', woodcut with hand colouring - Richard SeewaldĪmong the many techniques and processes employed within German Expressionism - painting in oils, etching, lithography, drypoint - perhaps their most iconic remain their woodcuts. ![]() And in subject matter, they sought imagery that would tap into and reflect our unrefined human element, our hopes, fears, feelings and desires wrought out in stylised rural landscapes, portraiture, in nudes both sensual and innocent, and in religious iconography. In form, subjects were exaggerated, simplified, and emboldened in designs that took inspiration from unusual sources, such as African and Oceanic folk art. In colour, they joined the Fauvists in using rich, primal, often clashing tones to elicit a more base emotional response from the viewer. Their art came from within, and to express this more abstract, visualised approach they naturally turned to more abstract forms of expression. Confronted with a landscape or a portrait, Expressionist artists sought to depict their experience of and response to the subject more-so than the subject itself, holding a mirror to the soul rather than the source of the illustration. 'Grosse Auferstehung', woodcut - Wassily KandinskyĪt its core, Expressionism was concerned with emotion and the individual experience in opposition to accurate, literal, realistic representation. Through the symbolism of each movement’s name - the ‘Bridge’ and the ‘Blue Rider’ - the Expressionists sought a brighter future: a crossing to a better land a lone horseman leaving society behind. Life in the city was intoxicating, in the most literal sense of the word nature, by contrast, was pure, physically and spiritually. ![]() Though the cityscape - particularly that of Berlin - offered vibrant colour, promiscuity, and the sordid allure of sex, drink, and dancing, in the midst of Germany’s accelerated industrialisation urban life seemed noxious and alienating. Their members would retreat to the Bavarian Alps, depicting themselves in harmony with their uncorrupted surroundings as they bathed in lakes or lay naked on hillsides like old-world peasant shepherds. In Romanticism, the all-important primacy of the individual and the spiritual power of the natural world were set against the proprieties of Church and State, a struggle Die Brücke and Der Blau Reiter readily took up. 'Anbetung' ('The Adoration'), woodcut - Georg Alexander Mathéyīoth groups traced back their key themes to the Sturm und Drang literature of the late 1700s and the Romantic movement that soon followed it. Though by the later years of Expressionism’s chronology it had come to encompass the work of a number of distinct groups, individual artists, and stylistic schisms, its birth is generally traced to that of two major movements: Die Brücke (‘The Bridge’) first convened in Dresden in 1905 and figure-headed by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and later, in 1911, Der Blaue Reiter, formed in Munich by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and the young Paul Klee. Its members renounced the traditional values held in art institutions and society at large, and sought to establish an avant-garde movement that would cut a swathe through those elements of contemporary culture they saw as most destructive and damaging: the rise of the urban landscape and its mechanised industrialisation the austerity and prudishness of state-sponsored art and religion and, above all, the predominance of conventional representation in art and the ideology of realism. 'Die Bettler', woodcut - Heinrich CampendonckĮmerging and evolving throughout the early 1900s right up to the interwar period and Hitler’s eventual ascent to power, German Expressionism was born on a wave of resistance and reaction. So began the manifesto of the German movement Die Brücke, condensing to a single line the core essence of the Expressionist philosophy: to produce art of the emotions, of frankness and intensity of feeling, and of the deeply personal and spiritual. Whoever renders directly and authentically that which impels him to create is one of us.
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