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German Painting: How Art captured modern Life and Light
Impressionism in German painting captures the fleeting beauty of light and life. From Max Liebermann to Lovis Corinth, artists blended French influences with German sensibility, creating works that reflect emotion, atmosphere, and the rhythm of modern existence.
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“The divine is everywhere, even in the grain of sand” – Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a German Romantic painter known for his landscapes and seascapes that often featured mystical, eerie, and contemplative scenes.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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[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…
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