EXPRESSIONISM

Fauvism (1905 – 1908)

This term does not describe a clearly definable movement, nor any specific set of commonly shared objectives. There were no manifestoes, no theoretical statements. The term was coined when at the 3rd Salon d’Automne of 1905 a critic Louis Vauxcelles, used the phrase “Un Donatello parmi les fauves” (A`Donatello (i.e. genuine artist), amongst the wild beasts”), to describe a restrained classical style of a torso in a room of paintings by Matisse, Rouault (although he exhibited with them he was not professedly a Fauve), Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Camoin, Manguin and others. The newspaper ‘Le Figaro’ commented at the time that “A pot of paint had been thrown at the public’s head”.

The wildness lay in the violent execution and experimental colour of the paintings (they were full of distortions and flat patterns and painted in bold colours). It may also have referred to the subject matter (mainly prostitutes) of Rouault’s current paintings, which drew the heaviest criticisms. The independence of Rouault’s work demonstrated the range of variety in work across Fauve painting. For some, like Vlaminck, a self styled anarchist, it was an over confident last fling with Post-Impressionism, however, for Matisse it was a crucial moment of educated decision making.

The Fauves never tried to copy or interpret nature (like the Impressionists), but sought to exploit it as an autonomous reality. They retained from the visual world, only what was useful to their purposes.

INFLUENCES

The principle Fauves were Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Matisse came to be regarded as their leader. Almost from the first they had usedthe brighter anti-naturalistic colours of the Symbolists (Matisse, Marquet and Rouault had all been pupils of MOREAU, a French Symbolist, who taught them about the expressive power of pure colour).

From the masters of the immediate past they absorbed an even more useful lesson: that in the search for new art, for new means of expression and new expressive ends, they must dare all, distrusting and relying only on themselves and the truth of their own experience.

They saw the work of:

  • Signac and Cross – NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS, painting simplified landscapes using large block s of colour.
  • Van Gogh – Expressive brushstrokes and vibrant colour.
  • Gauguin – Colour and flattened picture surface.
  • Cezanne – Not the underlying structure of planes defining space and mass, but the surface pattern created by the colours in which the planes were embodies.
  • Primitive Arts – Derain and Vlaminck bought masks at the exhibitions in Paris of Mohammedans art in 1903.
  • Post-Impressionism – The use of pure colour in an expressive rather than a naturalistic role, the emphatically separated brush marks, formal distortions and simplifications and a rhythmic curvilinear surface organisation.

Fauvism had no exclusive connection with any particular kind of subject matter, but was concerned with the direct use of colour and form, not to suggest but to express. It was a necessary step in the emancipation of art from literal depiction. The essence of what cam to be known as Fauvism, which every painter interpreted in his own way, lay in the uninhibited use of colour to define form and express feeling.

MATISSE 1869 – 1954: Matisse’s painting was an ongoing development using pure colour and divisionist techniques through to a more spontaneous and freer technique to create expressive harmonies. Ultimately his style developed beyond Fauvism to a very much more patinas’ style.

DERAIN 1880 – 1964: One of the three principle Fauves. He was a painter, sculptor, ceramicist, theatrical set designer and book illustrator.

VLAMINCK 1876 – 1958: An almost self-taught artist who was also a professional cyclist and itinerant violinist. He said that what he tried to express in paint, would, in a social context, have entailed throwing a bomb. He derided classical and Renaissance art, wishing to “Burn the Ecole des Beaux Arts with my vermilions”, and wanted to translate his feelings into paint without a thought for what had gone before.

DIE BRUCKE (THE BRIDGE) 1905 – 1913

A German Expressionist Group

An association of painters formed by the young German architectural students Kirchner, Heckel, Bleyl and Schmidt-Rotluff at Dresden in 1905, who wanted to realise the kind of artists community of which Van Gogh and Gauguin had dreamed. They are regarded as Germany’s first modern movement group and the term ‘Expressionist’, which was used as early as 1911 to describe all modern painting, soon came to mean specifically German art.

Subject matter

More obviously contemporary than that of the Fauves and the Cubists, their subject matter expresses the restlessness of the city dweller. Superficially we see a reflection of the brilliance and agitation of the city. More profoundly we see anxiety and distress. The sources of this attitude lie far back in the 19thcentaury, in the realisation of the appalling emptiness of a world in which God, as Nietzsche (the German philosopher) had declared, was dead. Sexuality and its relationship to society and to the world in which we live are apparent in some of the paintings. As critics of society the artists attempted to expose its moral decline.

The Founders

The founders of Die Brucke were young men with a strong sense of mission, deeply imbued with the soaring social aspirations of their day, and determined to work towards a better future for mankind with art as their medium. They regarded themselves as a revolutionary elite and were aggressively anti-bourgeois.

The Name

The name ‘Die Brucke’, meaning ‘The Bridge’, was chosen by Schmidt-Rotluff, and was meant to symbolise the link which held the group together. It later came to be given a deeper significance, as indicating their faith in the art of the future, towards which their own work was to serve as a bridge through its communal activity and its annual and travelling exhibitions.

The differences between German Expressionism and Fauvism

Although both Die Brucke and Fauvism started in the same year of 1905, German Expressionism was much more full of exaggerated distortions and drew its influence from Nordic folklore. It grew out of Kirkegaard’s angst, Nietzsche’s nihilism and Munch’s convulsive forms. The colours of Fauvism came form Newton and Chevreul whereas the colours of German Expressionism cam from the colour theories and metaphysics developed by Goethe. The German Expressionism of Die Brucke was tinged with political and social overtones, not present in Fauve paintings.

DER BLAUE REITER (THE BLUE RIDER) 1911 – 1914

The Blue Rider was an informal association of artists formed in Munich in 1911 by Kandinsky, Marc, Munter and Kubin. They were gifted individuals who believed in freedom for experiment and expression and wanted proper opportunities’ to exhibit their work.

Kandinsky (Russian artist) became increasingly interested in the search for freedom of artistic expression for all artists as well as himself. He quit the ‘New Artists Association’ when one of his paintings was rejected for being too large! Munter, Marc and Kubin left with him and the Blue Rider was formed days later. The group was not a school or a movement and was no more than a brief episode in the history of 20th century art. Yet this simple association of friends who gathered in Munich around the co-founders, a highly controversial painter, Kandinsky, and a virtually unknown young German, Marc, has left its mark in the 20th century.

Between Dec 1911 and May 1912 there was a single publication (the Almanac) and 2 exhibitions. The importance of ‘The Blue Rider’ group lies in the fact that it brought together an international group of artists, including writers and musicians. Thus, they were attempting to break down the barriers between the arts. They rejected naturalism but did not insist upon one particular style. The artists, united by a shared faith in spiritual regeneration through renewal of painting, visualised an art that would know “neither nationality, nor frontiers, bit simple humanity”. Unlike the Brucke group there was no desire to use their art for social reform.

Kandinsky and Marc, the editors, were interested in painting, music and the theatre, but also with the realm of science. They established a fundamental relationship between the beginnings of abstraction and the realism of the Douanier Rousseau, between the art if African or Bavarian folklore and the latest offerings of the Eurpoean avant-garde. These came together beside the drawings of children, the paintings of El Greco and Schoenberg’s discoveries in music as well as Kandinsky’s research in the field of composition for the theatre.

The Almanac - May 1912

The cover for the Almanac was a wood engraving by Kandinsky. It was printed in blue and black on cream. 11 sketches for the final can be still be catalogued today.

The theme of the horseman had been present in Kandinsky’s work form the first; Marc’s favourite colour was blue “a typically celestial colour”, and his favourite subject from the animals that he loved was the horse. “We both like blue, Marc liked horses, I liked riders” said Kandinsky. The image finally chosen for the cover came from a painting that Kandinsky had created in the style of naïve Bavarian pictures. St. George (famed for his fight with the dragon) was much venerated in the Marnau area of Germany, but in the final wood engraving the lance and dragin have disappeared, leaving only the horseman (rider) with a human figure gazing up at him in the bottom right quarter. Here the image of St. George has been used to symbolise the horseman of the apocalypse transformed into a herald announcing the coming of a spiritual renewal.

WASSILLY KANDINSKY (1866 – 1944)

From his early years he was aware of the expressive power of pure colour and pure sound and his artistic achievement was to be based on the mutual exchanges between visual and auditory properties, including the inaudible “inner sound of things”.

Influences:

  • As a child he felt excited on seeing colours freshly squeezed from the tube.
  • He recognised the beauty of mulit-coloured Moscow at sunset, ringing with bells.
  • He was interested in ethnology (the science of races and their relationship to one another), the natural sciences and music, all of which developed his capacity for abstract thinking.
  • He saw the painted interiors of the peasant’s houses in Russia and felt that he had stepped inside a painting (an experience he hoped the spectator would experience in his own art).
  • He discovered the ‘reciprocal response’ of colour and light in Rembrandt’s paintings and the work of Monet.

The importance of music in his painting.

The relationships between colour and music became apparent to him at a performance of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’. Music revealed the possibility is synaesthetic experience to Kandinsky. The relationship between colours and sounds, between music and painting became apparent and very important to him, so much so that the correspondence between the various forms became a cornerstone of his artistic convictions and the foundations of his painting.

The expressive power of colour.

For Kandinsky all forms had meaning, no form was without meaning, although individual interpretation of forms might vary. He also recognised that particular colours could express different things to different people.

Colour

Kandinsky defined the qualities of the principle hues.

BLUE is horizontal “the typical heavenly colour; the ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest”.

YELLOW is vertical acute, aggressive, even ‘manic’.

GREEN is composed of blue and yellow, is calm. The directions cancel each other out, so that ‘absolute green is the most restful colour, lacking any undertone of joy, grief or passion’.

Form

Form which Kandinsky thought more fundamental than colour, since there is no colour which does not take some form, has similar reverberations. “A triangle is such an entity, with its particular spiritual perfume. In relation to other forms this perfume many be somewhat modified but it remains in intrinsic quality the same, as the scent of the rose cannot be mistaken for that of the violet”.

Towards Abstraction

Representational references do not disappear entirely from Kandinsky’s painting until after 1920.

Between 1910 and 1914 Kandinsky did 3 principle types of painting until after 1920.

  1. Impressions – These paintings are his last link with the immediate past. They are direct impressions of nature, expressed in purely pictorial form. They often look abstract but there are clues in the titles. e.g. “Concert” 1911, “Impressions III (concert)” 1911.
  2. Improvisations – These paintings were supposed to convey spontaneous emotional reactions. E.g. “Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons)” 1913.
  3. Compositions – These were the paintings he spent the most time on thought and energy, e.g. “Compositions VII” 1913. He described them as “expressions of a slowly formed inner feeling, tested and worked over repeatedly and almost pedantically ………….Reason, consciousness, purpose, play an overwhelming part. But of calculation nothing appears: only feeling”

Beliefs

Kandinsky grew up in the Russian Orthodox Church, but grew up believing that the salvation of humanity lied in the rediscovery of the spirit, of the soul of man and the hidden law of the universe. For Kandinsky the material world had been reduced to nothingness by scientific progress. The news of Rutherford’s splitting of the atom filled him with dismay when he realised that the world of apparent substances no longer had any real existence. Henceforward spiritual realities were alone valid, and his task was to reveal them. Thus his work always had an objective spiritual purpose.

The three main events which led Kandinsky to abstraction

  1. Seeing Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ and not immediately recognising the subject.
  2. Seeing his own painting upside down and not recognising it.
  3. The splitting of the atom.

Kandinsky’s use of pictorial space

Kandinsky discovered an entirely new kind of pictorial space. The form in his pictures, the coloured shapes, have no familiar equivalents in the world of appearance, and therefore need not be placed in conventional perspective arrangements. The space within the picture appears to continually expand and contract and can never be seen as a static unity. Kandinsky’s images were intentional, deliberate and prepared, whereas some Abstract Expressionists imagery was accidentally generated and had built into them the ‘laws of chance’.

Kandinsky played an important role in the teaching of painting at the Bauhaus school. He had to design a course which would benefit all artists, designers and craftsmen to learn about form and harmony.

FRANZ MARC 1880 – 1916

As a young man Marc studied theology and philosophy and was influenced by the Impressionists use of colour. He used unnatural, expressive colour and a symbolic colour theory influenced by Macke and Delaunay. This can be seen in many of his paintings:

BLUE: The male principle, severe and spiritual

YELLOW: The female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual

RED: Matter, brutal and heavy, the colour that has to come into conflict with, the passive and succumb to, the other two.

He said “If you mix red and yellow to obtain orange, you endow the passive and female yellow with a termagent like sensual power, so that the cool intellectual blue, the male element, becomes indispensable again. Indeed, blue immediately and automatically takes its place alongside orange, the two colours love each other”.

Marc’s attitude to the painting of animals

He believed that animals were both more beautiful and more spiritual than human beings. He painted untamed animals in nature based on his own studies of nature and animal anatomy, the horse being his most frequent subject matter. Around 1911 to 1912 he was trying to paint nature as animals experience it. He wanted to express the inner truth which he saw as “never on the surface”. He changed local colour for symbolic colour and descriptive form for more emphatic rhythmic harmonies. The masterpiece for this period is his ‘The fate of the Animals’ 1913 in which the terrified creatures cowering in the forest are attacked by revolving and intersecting rays of light, like Futurist streams of dynamic energy, communicating the animals helplessness at the supreme moment of their fate. Marc inscribed his belief in the unity of all life, human and animal, on the back of this canvas in the words “and all being is flaming suffering”.