-
KLEE: A Contrapunctal (e) Motion
Exhibition: Rosso, Klee, Sonnier and more Date: Nov 9 2018 to Mar 7 2019 Venue: Hilti Art Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein Exhibition:Paul Klee: The Berggruen Collection from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Date: Nov 16, 2018 – Mar 17, 2019 Venue: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada In a collection of his writings titled The Thinking Eye, Paul Klee once asked his readers to take a “little journey” with him to “the land of Better Understanding.” He was speaking of the technical aspects of art, but the same invitation can be made at the outset of this brief profile of the artist. The Swiss-born Paul Klee (1879-1940) was one of the most inventive, witty,…
-
Edvard Munch: The black tears of Krakatoa (1883)
Edvard Munch , born in 1863, was Norway’s most popular artist. His brooding and anguished paintings, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of Expressionism. During his childhood, the death of his parents, his brother and sister, and the mental illness of another sister, were of great influence on his convulsed and tortuous art. In his works, Munch turned again and again to the memory of illness, death and grief. During his career, Munch changed his idiom many times. At first, influenced by Impressionism and Post-impressionism, he turned to a highly personal style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death. In the 1892s,…
-
Franz Marc: War Crime: The Assassinated Painter
During his lifetime Franz Marc was widely regarded as one of the most promising German painters of his generation. His death in the First World War was mourned as a bitter loss for the art world. It was also a deep personal loss for his surviving friends, Klee and Kandinsky – his other close friend from the Der Blaue Reiter circle, Macke, had died before him on the battlefield. As a young student, Marc had intended to study philosophy and theology. Then, in 1900, he decided to become a painter instead, and registered at the Munich Art academy. Marc’s early work was relatively naturalistic, but it showed evidence of his…
-
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Blues in the soul…
The self-appointed “leader” of the artists’ group Die Brücke (Bridge), founded in Dresden in 1905, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a key figure in the early development of German Expressionism. His first works show the influence of Impressionism, Post-impressionism and Jugendstil, but by about 1909, Kirchner was painting in a distinctive, expressive manner with bold, loose brushwork, vibrant and nonnaturalistic colours and heightened gestures. He worked in the studio from sketches made very rapidly from life, often from moving figures, from scenes of life out in the city or from the Die Brücke group’s trips to the countryside. A little later he began making roughly hewn sculptures from single blocks of wood.…
-
Otto Dix: A man with clenched fists cursing the moon!
Dix was born near Gera but gained his first experience and training in art in the venerable baroque city of Dresden. He would return there in 1927 to take up a position as professor at the Academy. However, Dix’s first important work was produced in the midst of the violence of the First World War. Slightly younger than the original Expressionists, he had a long and prolific career in which his work went through significant changes. Loosely, these changes followed the key developments in the German avant-garde, from Expressionism to Dada and then, from about 1923, the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). However, Dix’s work was so varied that it…
-
Paul Klee: Swiss? or German?
Paul Klee was born in 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and grew up within a family of musicians. Instead of following his musical roots he chose to study art at the Munich Academy. However, his childhood love of music always remained important in his life and work. In 1911, Klee met Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke , Franz Marc , and other avant-garde figures and participated in important shows of avant-garde art, including the second Blaue Reiter exhibition at Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, in 1912. Primitive art, Surrealism and Cubism, all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings of fantasy and satire. Klee’s art was also distinguished by an extraordinary diversity…
-
George Grosz: Marshal Propaganda
George Grosz, who spent much of his childhood in a small town in the German province of Pomerania, was fascinated by big cities. Those that gripped his imagination most were the biggest and most frenetic – above all, Berlin and New York. He made Berlin his home until the rise of Nazism made Germany unbearable, but he dreamt of America, his youthful imagination fired by stories of cowboys and gold diggers. Grosz’s early work, made during the First World War, is his most “Expressionist”. His drawings and paintings of alienated individuals, rioting masses, furtive criminals, prostitutes and (very real) brutal mass violence are staged in the streets, tenements and back…
-
Max Beckmann: The More Often We Die, The More Alive We Are
Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig. As a student in the cradle of Germany’s Enlightenment, Weimar, he read avidly the works of Schopenhauer and became interested in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. Having graduated in 1903, he painted his early canvases in Paris. Cézanne particularly impressed him. Beckmann’s own early work was in a broadly Impressionist mode and could sometimes be quite traditional in its composition and treatment of historical or monumental subjects. Beckmann retained through his life an instinctive feel for the art of the past, gravitating towards images and epochs in which he saw powerful and simple expression. As his own distinctive style developed, this took the form especially…
-
Expressionism: Final Part
[amazon_link asins=’B00KHLOXIM’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’parkstone-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’e0bc337b-9cea-11e7-ad63-832aa7533b34′] In a watercolour titled like a holiday souvenir snapshot, Me in Brussels, Dix depicted himself as a soldier; cigarette clamped in the mouth and with hot red gaze fixed intently on the ample buttocks of a prostitute. He pursues her into the inviting light of a brothel. In his written notes and in interviews, Dix often underlined what he saw as the essential link between the drives to sex and to war. Later, in post-war Germany, he also came to see the fate of the male war cripple and the female prostitute as a shared one. Grosz emerged from mental hospital in 1917, convinced…
-
[Part 5/6] Expressionism: Make Love, Not War
When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, four years of battle and years more of devastating crises lay ahead. One of Marc’s paintings that articulates a grim anticipation of war and foresees its origins in South-Eastern Europe was Das arme Land Tirol (The Unfortunate Land of Tirol) of 1913. In the same year he painted a pack of wolves and subtitled the work Balkankrieg (Balkan War). Ernst Barlach sculpted a furious, hurtling avenging angel just as the hostilities commenced. Yet in spite of a tide of apocalyptic prophecies, few could imagine the cold reality of modern, technological warfare, in “this endless, loveless war” as Marc was…
This is an interactive art blog in multi languages, you will find new articles on artists, art history, exhibitions, etc. Contributions welcome.
You must be logged in to post a comment.