Expressionism. Ashley Bassie
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urbanisation, rationalisation and secularisation – created ruptures in the social fabric that were not easily absorbed or contained. In spite of this, the process of Germany’s economic modernisation, supervised by an absolutist military state, was carried out with precision and discipline – even though these were qualities sometimes lacking in the monarch himself. Traditional morality both relied upon and fed orderliness and the power of institutions: above all, the monarchy, the church, the family, school and the army. Paul Klee, a Swiss, satirised with cruel precision a particularly Prussian “virtue” – unquestioning obedience to authority – in an early etching. It shows a grotesquely fawning monarchist, ludicrous in his nakedness, bowing down so low before an apparition of a crown that he appears on the verge of toppling into the abyss.
Expressionism was a self-consciously youthful movement. The “Founding Manifesto of the Brücke” (quoted in the previous chapter) proclaims it clearly. It bears witness to the generation gap, which had widened to a gulf. In their age, the primary influence on young people was no longer parental, but increasingly, social. The programme very clearly identifies “a new generation of creators” and “youth”, striving for “freedom of life”, as a group quite distinct from the “long-established older forces”. Significantly, Kirchner’s call to youth was not unique. At this time, many young Germans were discovering group identities for themselves. After the turn of the century, numerous youth groups formed, the largest of which became the Wandervögel movement.
Erich Heckel, Girl with Doll (Fränzi), 1910.
Oil on canvas, 65 x 70 cm.
Private collection.
Immersion in the German countryside as an antidote to the city was not just a recuperative measure. It was a whole ideology. This encompassed urban workers’ associations seeking alleviation from city drudgery by means of invigorating country hikes, student organisations, Christian and Jewish groups, communities inspired by German paganism, ultra-nationalists as well as socialist pacifists, anarchists, vegetarians, those interested in Eastern philosophies, and all manner of others seeking reforming lifestyles. Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement was a direct expression of the desire for a return to pre-industrial values, so it is not surprising that John Ruskin and William Morris were among the prophets often upheld by these groups. Jugendstil, iconographically and stylistically “youthful”, organic and anti-materialist, was often the nearest visual metaphor for this ethos. In a large, highly stylised canvas by the eminent Swiss painter, Ferdinand Hodler (whose distinctive “parallelism” is also related to Jugendstil), the abstract concept of “truth” is given allegorical form in the figure of a gleaming female nude, whose light dazzles the draped male figures around her. The widespread Freikörperkultur, naturism, or “Free Body Culture” movement, originated in this context. Most of these were middle-class movements, but they shared a desire to establish a principled independence from the crass materialism of modern life.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marzella, 1909–1910.
Oil on canvas, 76 x 60 cm.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fränzi in Front of Carved Chair, 1910.
Oil on canvas, 71 x 49.5 cm.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
The foundation of groups such as the Brücke can be seen as part of this predominantly youthful German movement. They “belonged” to a new age that was not their parents’. This helps to account for their rejection of the public moral and spiritual values of the older generation. It also sheds light on other Expressionists’ imagery of youth. There is more than a whiff of Nietzsche around Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s young, contemplative, ascending youth, for example. Its articulation of both the inwardness and the aspirational vitalism of the generation moved many who saw it.
It was particularly through representations of the body, sexuality, and nature that many Expressionists enacted both their resistance to bourgeois culture and their accompanying search for rejuvenated creativity. In this context, the naked frolics of the Brücke artists and models on their summer excursions to the Moritzburg lakes north of Dresden are not the lunatic forays of decadent bohemians, but are also related to existing contemporary trends. They went there in the summers of 1909, 1910 and 1911. Max Pechstein gave an idyllic description, recalling the spirit of their trip in 1910, when he, Kirchner and Heckel were accompanied by friends and models: “We lived in absolute harmony; we worked and we swam. If a male model was needed… one of us would jump into the breach”. The communal harmony was entirely in keeping with the utopian spirit of Gemeinschaft, or “community”.
On the 1910 trip to Moritzburg, Kirchner painted his Nudes Playing Under a Tree. This and other works, such as a woodcut showing a group of nudes playing with reeds, show evidence of Kirchner’s interest in a set of carved and painted wooden beams that he had recently sketched in the Dresden Ethnographic Museum. These carvings, from a men’s club in the Micronesian Palau Islands, depicted scenes of daily life and erotic mythology, such as a story of a native with a giant penis who was capable of penetrating his wife on another island. Pechstein was so enamoured with his fantasy of life in the South Seas that, like Gauguin before him, he actually travelled to the Palau Islands in 1914. Kirchner’s “primitivism” too is not purely stylistic; it also involves an eroticism that is deliberately unsophisticated, “instinctive” and implicitly primeval. This would have been at odds with even the more liberated of the conservative nature-worshippers. The “primitivism” aspired to by the Wandervögel and free body cultists was essentially either pan-German medievalism or “healthy” asexual aestheticism, not liberated sexuality. The embracing couple in Kirchner’s painting alone goes against the terms of conservative German naturism, which had a strong emphasis on health and often prescribed gender-segregated areas for its patrons. Thus, while the Brücke joined their fellow Germans in their escapes to the country, their physical and aesthetic response to nature had very little to do with intellectualised therapy or sentimental nationalism.
Back in the city, the Brücke studios in Dresden were communal, social environments for creativity and liberated nudity. A later photograph of a friend, Hugo Biallowons, dancing naked across Kirchner’s Berlin studio, although taken after the Brücke had disbanded, conveys something of this ambience. These were other “alternative” spaces, outside the norms of public life. The Brücke’s work, lifestyle and interiors are all redolent of a reaction against “civilised” sophistication and “civilised” sexual etiquette. The rough-hewn wood sculptures and woodcuts they made were part of the search for a “direct” way of working. It is also no coincidence that Kirchner painted his human subjects with pseudo-African carvings, exotic accessories or against backdrops of the murals and wall-hangings with “primitive” motifs of lovers that decorated their Dresden studios.
Franz Marc, Shepherds, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 100 x 135 cm.
Pinakothek der Moderne Kunstareal München, Munich.
Late in 1909, Kirchner and Heckel began using two young girls, Fränzi and Marzella, aged somewhere between ten and fifteen, as models for numerous paintings and graphic works (pp.39–41). They came from the local working-class district of Friedrichstadt. In the Brücke works, they sometimes appear in outdoor settings – they accompanied the artists to the lakes in 1910 – but usually they are in the studio, often nude and shown with dolls, animals or “primitive” carvings. Adolescent subjects had provided powerful and controversial material in Germany already. Frank Wedekind’s play, Frühlingserwachen (Spring’s Awakening), written in 1890–91, focused on the tragic fate of three adolescents for whom the onset of puberty awakens feelings and emotions that throw them into direct conflict with the strictures of bourgeois morality. Breaking several taboos at once (homosexuality, suicide and abortion among them), it was banned in Germany for several years. But by the time the Brücke