At the beginning of the new century European art had reached a stage which is best described by the French phrase, reculer pour mieux sauter. There was no suggestion of retreat, but there was a pause. In 1900 Maurice Denis painted the Hommage a Cezanne which is now in the Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris. It shows among others Bonnard, Vuillard, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, and Denis himself gathered round the man whom they recognized as their master—a sedate group. In this same year Gauguin retired to his final exile—the Marquesas—he was to die there in misery three years later. Van Gogh and Seurat were dead and ToulouseLautrec was dying; Degas was going blind, and though Monet was still to paint a series of pictures of the greatest significance for the future, his ponds and his waterlilies, he too was threatened with blindness. Renoir was also a sick man, though in the nineteen years that remained to him he was to paint some of his greatest works.
In spite of this apparent arrest of the movement, a position had been established from which there was no retreat: and what had been achieved was so dazzling in its glory that every young artist in Europe and America turned towards Paris with unbearable longing. At the Great World Exhibition that was held in Paris in 1900 the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists had been admitted in strength, and though the public was still far from fully accepting them, their fame was now world-wide.
Paris and Munich
From every direction young artists made their way to Paris. In the first ten years practically every artist who was to become a leader of new movements in the new century visited Paris, and many of them came to stay. Some of them were born in or near Paris—Rouault, Picabia, Delaunay, Utrillo, Derain, and Vlaminck; other French artists moved in from the provinces— Braque and Leger in 1900, Arp and Marcel Duchamp in 1904. Picasso came to Paris for the first time in 1900 and soon returned to stay. Brancusi came via Munich in 1904, Archipenko in 1908, Chagall in 1910. Kandinsky visited Paris in 1902 and again in 1906-7; and Klee in 1905. Juan Gris came and settled there in 1906. From Germany came Nolde in 1899, Paula ModersohnBecker in 1900, and Franz Marc in 1903. From Italy came Carra in 1900, and Boccioni in 1902; Severini and Modigliani in 1906. Even from America a pioneering artist, John Marin, came in 1905; and in the same year Max Weber left Paris and established an outpost of the new movement in New York.
At the same time another concentration of forces was taking place in Munich. The history of this first decade in Munich has never been adequately written, and no doubt it is not strictly comparable with the history of the same decade in Paris. The German Impressionists, Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, were active in Munich at the turn of the century, but it was the academic fame of Munich that attracted such foreign artists as Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei von Jawlensky, Naum Gabo and Paul Klee; and though Munich was alert to all that was happening in Paris, the Bavarian capital radiated a more philosophical spirit with a consequent desire to justify the practice of art in theoretical terms. Two of the decisive documents of the modern movement were written in Munich at this time—Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfiihlung (1908), 1 in which for the first time a will to abstraction in art was postulated as a recurrent historical phenomenon; and Kandinsky’s Vber das Geistige in der Kunst (1912) 2 in which also for the first time an abstract ‘art of internal necessity’ was proclaimed and justified as a contemporary phenomenon.
The Fauves
In Paris the painters who reacted against Impressionism were known as ‘les fauves’ (the wild beasts), a name first used as a witticism by the critic Louis Vauxcelles at the time of the Autumn Salon of 1905. The name was apt because the means used by these painters were decidedly violent. These painters were in effect Expressionists, as we shall see, and although the final outcome of each movement was to be very different, there was for a time a close parallel between the concurrent developments in Paris and in Germany (particularly those in Munich). But parallels, it should be remembered, have a distinct point of departure, and never meet.
Fauvism, if we are to believe the statements of the painter who became the leader of the group, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), began as a revolt against the deliberate methodism of NeoImpressionists like Seurat and Signac. ‘Fauvism shook off the tyranny of divisionism,’ Matisse once declared, and further explained: 3
‘Neo-Impressionism, or rather that part of it which is called Divisionism, was the first organization of the method of Impressionism, but this organization was purely physical and often mechanical. The splitting up of colour brought the splitting up of form and contour. The result: a jerky surface. Everything is reduced to a mere sensation of the retina, but one which destroys all tranquillity of surface and contour. Objects are differentiated only by the luminosity that is given them. Everything is treated in the same way. In the end there is nothing but tactile animation, comparable to the vibrato of a violin or voice. Turning more and more grey with time, Seurat’s paintings have lost the programme quality of their colour arrangement and have retained only their authentic values, those human, painterly values which today seem all the more profound.’
Matisse had abandoned a career in law and at the age of twenty-two, in the winter of 1891-2, came to Paris to study under Bouguereau, then at the height of his popularity. He soon discovered that he had made a mistake and transferred himself to the more romantic but still academic studio of Gustave Moreau.
Matisse
There he met as fellow-students Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Albert Marquet (1875-1947), and several others who were to remain associated with him in the struggles ahead. It is difficult to see what any of them owed to Moreau as a teacher, unless it was the virtues of application and self-discipline (the ‘orientalism’ of the Fauves which is sometimes ascribed to Moreau, certainly had a different origin). Matisse’s particular illumination was to come, not in Moreau’s studio, but from a direct contact with Pissarro and other Impressionists. His son-in-law, in a footnote which is too important to be left in typographical obscurity, relates that ‘It was Wery, one of Bonnat’s pupils [Leon Bonnat was another teacher under whom Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy were to study], who introduced Matisse to Impressionism. He travelled in Brittany with this painter, then under the influence of Sisley’s technique. After a short stay together at Belle-Ile (1896), Matisse went on alone to Beuzec-Cap-Sizun, a small market-town in Finistere, whence he brought back the usual indispensable local souvenirs, an £glise and a Femme gardant un Cochon. He had already painted in Brittany some very original landscapes, of ample composition and full bluish tonality. In these works, curiously reminiscent of Courbet and Delacroix, the painter employs the usual scale of tones. His breadth of vision and intensity of expression suggest that he is approaching a point of rapture (1895). The effusion of the Fauve hemorrhage would seem due to the indirect intervention of Wery. Each of the two young painters, in the course of repeated discussions, had succeeded in convincing the other of the excellence and superiority of his reasons. On their return to Paris, Matisse’s palette was composed of brilliant colours, Wery’s of bitumen, which obtained for him a considerable if brief popularity.’ 4
This was in 1896. When, towards 1897, Matisse’s painting, hitherto sombre, ‘took on the radiance of his later work, it was (Duthuit relates) from deep within himself that he drew his palette of bright blue, blue-green, emerald and madder’. 5 So even before 1900, as Marquet also confirms, Matisse was working in what later became known as the Fauve manner. In 1898 he had painted
henri matisse Self-portrait
a large male nude in pure blue which even his friends found disconcerting. This seems to have been a spontaneous experiment, a product of his instinctive revolt. But just a 4 this stage in his development he was guided towards the true source of discipline by Camille Pissarro, the most perceptive genius of the whole of this epoch. Pissarro may not have been the first to bring Cezanne to the notice of Matisse, but he it was who made clear his significance, to such effect that in 1899 Matisse, who could ill afford even the modest price (1300 francs) that the dealer Vollard asked for it, bought a painting by the master of Aix. This painting, Three Bathers, was to remain in his possession until 1936, when he presented it to the Museum of the City of Paris, with the remark in an accompanying letter that for thirty-seven years it had ‘sustained me spiritually in the critical moments of my career as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverence’. 6
What had Matisse discovered in Cezanne at this turning-point in his career? Simply that colours in a painting must have a structure, or, to phrase it in another way, that structure is given
Matisse
to a painting by the considered relationship of its constituent colours. That may seem to differ in no way from Seurat’s ideal of structural harmony, but Matisse condemned Seurat for destroying colour’s integrity—splitting it up into dots took the life out of it. Colours must be used in their ‘plenitude’ (Cezanne’s word), and the problem was to reveal the structure while maintaining the purity of the colours, eschewing those adventitious aids due to an admixture of black or grey. Cezanne was the only precursor who had had the same ambition.
But Matisse did not become a mere imitator of Cezanne, and this was due to the conviction, which he shared with many artists of this time, that art must be dynamic rather than static (as Seurat’s art seemed to be), expressive of a ‘nearly religious feeling towards life’ and not merely the record of a passing sensation (as the art of the Impressionists had been). This attitude is made very clear in the ‘Notes d’un peintre’ which Matisse published in La Grande Revue, Paris, 25 December 1908—one of the fundamental documents in the history of modern art. In the ten years that had passed since his painting of the Blue Nude, Matisse had found himself and become sure of his direction. It is significant that the first point he makes in this article is concerned with expression. ‘What I am after, above all, is expression. ... I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it. . . . Expression to my way of thinking does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. Th6 place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter’s disposal for the expression of his feelings.’ 7
Nothing could be clearer, and as we shall see, the aims of the German Expressionists, which were taking shape at the same time, were, as far as verbal formulations go, identical. But Matisse went on to make certain qualifications. The first was an insistence on ‘solidity’ as against the ‘charm, lightness, crispness’ of the
40 Matisse’s Aims
Impressionists. Immediate or superficial colour sensations must be ‘condensed’, and it is this condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture. This is the first sign of the influence of Cezanne: the work of art is not ‘immediate’—it is ‘a work of my mind’: it must have an enduring character and content, a character of serenity, and this is only arrived at by long contemplation of the problem of expression.
There are two ways of expressing things, Matisse then points out: ‘One is to show them crudely, the other is to evoke them artistically.’ Here is the crux which marks the possibility of a divergence between Matisse and some of his colleagues and more generally between French Expressionism and German Expressionism. Matisse had been looking at Egyptian and Greek art and at Oriental art, and had come to the important conclusion that ‘in abandoning the literal representation of movement it is possible to reach toward a higher ideal of beauty .’ The wild beast has been tamed! We search the rest of the article for a definition of this higher ideal, and find ourselves referred to the Greek virtues of serenity and harmony. ‘The Greeks too are calm; a man hurling a discus will be shown in the moment in which he gathers his strength before the effort or else, if he is shown in the most violent and precarious position implied by his action, the sculptor will have abridged and condensed it so that balance is re-established, thereby suggesting a feeling of duration. Movement in itself is unstable and is not suited to something durable like a statue unless the artist has consciously realized the entire action of which he represents only a moment.’
It is significant that Matisse should have chosen a piece of sculpture to illustrate his meaning, for he had been experimenting with this medium himself since 1899, and had for a time come under the influence of Rodin. Indeed, along with the painting by Cezanne which he acquired from Vollard in 1899, he also acquired the original plaster bust of Henri Rochefort by Rodin, and to this work he also clung through years of poverty; from this too he drew his faith and his perseverance. His first considerable work in sculpture, The Slave, which he began in 1900 and did not finish
henri matisse Vase and Pomegranates. 1947
42 Matisse's Methods
until 1903, is obviously influenced by Rodin’s Walking Man. Matisse even went so far as to ask Rodin to take him as a pupil, but Rodin seems to have rebuffed him, 8 with the result that Matisse went to Bourdelle for instruction. Sculpture always played a significant if subordinate part in Matisse’s career, from this early Slave of 1900 to the Crucifix he modelled for the chapel at Vence at the end of his life.
To return to the ‘Notes’ of 1908: In considering the ‘artistic’ way of expressing his feelings for life, Matisse distinguishes between order (clarity of form) and expression (purity of sensation). The sense of order he got from Cezanne, in whose pictures ‘all is so well arranged . . . that no matter at what distance you stand, you will always be able to distinguish each figure clearly and you will always know which limb belongs to which body. If in the picture there is order and clarity it means that this same order and clarity existed in the mind of the painter and that the painter was conscious of their necessity.’
In the first place, therefore, a clear vision of the whole composition in the mind of the painter.
Then comes the choice of colours, based' on observation, on feeling, and ‘on the very nature of each experience’. This latter phrase implies that there is no a priori theory of colour to fit the subject (such as Seurat or Signac had tried to establish), but that the artist must each time try to find a colour that fits his sensations. Matisse’s language is a little obscure at this point (and is not helped by the translation which ignores the distinction between ‘tone’ and ‘hue’), but Matisse means that a balance has to be struck among all the constituent hues of the picture, to such a degree that ‘a moment comes when every part has found its definite relationship and from then on it will be impossible for me to add a stroke to any picture without having to paint it all over again’.
After an expression of his abiding humanism (‘what interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure’) Matisse makes a confession that has led to much misunderstanding, but which must be reproduced again because it indicates,
henri matisse Portrait of Madame Matisse, igij
44 Matisse
more decisively than any other expression of his point of view, the distance that was to separate him from not only most of his fellowFauves, but from the Expressionists of Germany and elsewhere:
‘What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which might be for every mental worker, be he business man or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.’
An ingenuous statement, not altogether borne out by the works on which Matisse was busy at the time, e.g. The Two Negresses of 1908 (bronze) or the Jeannette (also bronze) of 1910-11, or the Nymph and Satyr of 1909 (Museum of Western Art, Moscow) or the Goldfish of 1909-10 (Copenhagen, Statens Museum). But this is also the period of the Dances of 1909 (Chrysler Collection) and 1910 (Museum of Western Art, Moscow), and by 1911 Matisse had fully accepted the implications of his creed. Exactly forty years later, however, for the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Matisse made another statement which makes clear that he never lost his expressive intention: ‘There is an inherent truth which must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to be represented. This is the only truth that matters. . . . These drawings are so little the result of chance, that in each one it can be seen how, as the truth of the character is expressed, the same light bathes them all, and that the plastic quality of their different parts—face, back— ground, transparent quality of the spectacles, as well as the feeling of material weight—all impossible to put into words, but easy to do by dividing a piece of paper into spaces by a simple line of almost even breadth—all these things remain the same ... its essential truth makes the drawing . . . Lexactitude n'est pas la verited 9
Exactitude is not truth is the thesis of the whole of the modern period in art, but as a thesis it was first clearly formulated by Matisse and the Fauves. Gauguin and the synthetists had formulated a different thesis which we call symbolism: the work
andre derain Self-portrait, c. igi2
I
r
andre derain Westminster Bridge, igoy
of art is not expressive but representative, a correlative for feeling and not an expression of feeling. Much as he admired Gauguin, Matisse shared Pissarro’s distrust of symbolism in general, and with the possible exception of early works like Luxe, calme et volupte (1904-5), Bonheur de vivre (1905-6), and La Danse (1909-10), where both composition and colour are subordinated to the idea, was never properly speaking a symbolist. It is necessary to emphasize this because his use of colour is often described as ‘symbolic’, simply because it is not ‘exact’ or naturalistic. But however much they may be modified in the interest of harmony or serenity, Matisse’s colours remain essentially expressive, derived from the function which colour has in the real existence of the object depicted. The modifications or transpositions which the colours
henri matisse Lady in Blue, iggy
The Fauves
undergo in the process of painting are based on selective observation, not on intellectual choice. ‘To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colours suit this season, I will be inspired only by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves. My sensation itself may vary, the autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer or quite cool with a cold sky and lemon yellow trees that give a chilly impression and announce winter.’ 10
The Fauves were never a coherent group, and Matisse was a leader by example rather than by precept. Of the artists who were to be associated with him, only Albert Marquet and Henri Manguin (1874-1943) had been fellow-students at Gustave Moreau’s studio, though other Fauve artists, such as Charles Camoin (b. 1879) and Jules Flandrin (1871-1947), followed him there later. From 1902 all these younger artists exhibited alongside Matisse at Berthe Weill’s gallery and later at the Salon des Independants. Others who then joined the group, not formally, but by association and sympathy, were Jean Puy (b. 1876), Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), Kees van Dongen (b. 1877), and Othon Friesz (1879-1949). But more important was the earlier adhesion, again sympathetic rather than formal, of Andre Derain (1880-1954) and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958). Matisse met Derain as early as 1899, in the studio of Eugene Carriere where he had also met Jean Puy, and Derain introduced him to Vlaminck at a van Gogh exhibition in 1901. Derain and Vlaminck had already arrived independently at a style that Matisse found agreeable—‘the painting of Derain and Vlaminck’, he later recalled, ‘did not surprise me, for it was close to the studies I myself was doing. But I was moved to see that these very young men had certain convictions similar to my own.’ 11
Finally, but not until 1907 and not to stay long with the group, came Georges Braque (b. 1882); but other artists too, Metzinger and Le Fauconnier, were also exhibiting with the Fauves at the Salon d’Automne or the Independants; and outside all groups were two painters who were as ‘fauve’ as any of the period—
maurice de vlaminck Village Street
Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso (b. 1881). Rouault has already been mentioned as a fellow-student of Matisse at Moreau’s; from his student days he was to pursue a lonely path, but he could not escape the influences that were abroad. Of all modern French painters he was the most expressionistic—in the sense that will be shortly made clear when we come to deal with the German Expressionists. But Picasso, too, in his Self-portrait of 1906 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) or the Two Nudes of the same year, was escaping from his youthful and sentimental mannerism and feeling his way towards a style at once more ‘solid’ and more powerful. But it would be a mistake to see in the turmoil of this decade any decisive tendency towards a unity of style. In fact, apart from personal mannerisms due to the individual artist’s temperament, the whole scene was torn apart by two contrary forces, for which the names of Cezanne and van Gogh may stand as symbols. The divergence of Matisse from Vlaminck or Friesz, for example, apart from any question of personal staying-power, is to be seen as a triumph of the Cezanne influence in the one case, of the van
SO Origins of Expressionism
Gogh influence in the other. But what then shall we say of the diverging paths of Matisse and Picasso, both of which have a common starting-point in Cezanne? One might suppose that Cezanne was rich enough to contain all contraries, but the truth is too complicated for chronological analysis. All these names, Matisse, Rouault, Vlaminck, Derain, Picasso, refer to human beings in themselves intricately complex, each with a sensibility exposed to an infinite number of sensations, and the movement proceeds, not like an army on the march with one or two commanding officers, but as the gradual establishment of a series of strong-points each occupied by a solitary genius.
Nevertheless, the historian, however despairing in the presence of a phenomenon so intangible as art, must point to similarities and identities which indicate that the individual is not so unique as he may assume, and that however isolated the position he takes up, he is nevertheless exposed to a seeding of invisible spores. I have pointed out already how many significant artists made their way to Paris in this first decade of the century. But some spiritual unrest had uprooted them, and this unrest infected many who nevertheless stayed in their provincial fastnesses. The history of art, I have suggested, must be written in the terms of art itself-— that is to say, as a piecemeal transformation of visual forms; but this does not mean that we should under-estimate the social and intellectual forces that from the beginning of the Romantic movement had been transforming the civilization of the Western World. The visual arts, and all the arts, are in this respect deeply involved, both as cause and symptom, in the general process of history. The arts have an originative function in this process—they pre-figure and give plastic precision to inhibitions and aspirations that would otherwise remain repressed and voiceless. In this sense artists are socially integrated, and act as units dispersed throughout society rather than as members of one or more self-sufficient and independent groups.
The origins of the Expressionist movement in Germany illustrate this fact very forcibly. One is immediately struck by the fact that although groups of artists did converge to definite centres, notably
raoul dufy The Artist and His Model in the Studio at Le Havre. ig2g
Die Briicke in Dresden in 1905 and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1911-12, some of the most influential members of these groups remained obstinately independent in their activities. Typical in this respect is an artist like Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), a sensitive nature absorbing romantic influences from Bocklin and Hans von Marees, blending these with a sensitive understanding of Gauguin and van Gogh, maintaining an essentially feminine tenderness, but nevertheless arriving in her isolation at a style that is in no way inconsistent with that of the period, as more consciously formulated by groups like Die Briicke. Karl Hofer (1878-1955) is another independent German artist of the period whose work nevertheless conforms stylistically to the general character of Expressionism.
52 Expressionism
One should remember that artists in forming groups are more often actuated by practical rather than ideological motives. They find themselves in a world that is hostile to any kind of originality, in conditions where doors can only be opened or funds obtained by joint action. Such action is partly practical, partly propagandist. The practical side may include, as it did to some extent in the case of the Briicke, the sharing of a workshop and materials; and the propagandist side may include manifestoes, periodicals, and books that express a common purpose. But this community of purpose and practice is more likely to be evident in the early and difficult days of a young artist’s life. With the coming of economic independence the individuality of each member of the group is sure to assert itself and its unity dissolves. The average life of such a group is not more than four or five years.
German Expressionism has certain elements which are common to French Fauvism, and these have a common source, not only in the Jugendstil-Art Nouveau mannerisms already mentioned, but also in the more personal characteristics of van Gogh and Gauguin. In so far as an exotic element enters into German Expressionism, and it is particularly evident in the work of Emil Nolde (1867-1956), and to a lesser extent in the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Mueller (1874-1930), and Max Pechstein (1881-1955), it is almost certainly in each case derived from Gauguin, though we must again remember the direct influence of Oriental art. But this is not the distinctive element in German Expressionism or in van Gogh—what distinguishes the style from French Fauvism is a much wider and more basic prejudice—what Wilhelm Worringer was to call ‘the transcendentalism of the Gothic world of expression’. Worringer’s two treatises, Abstraktion und Einfiihlung (1908) and Formprobleme der Gothik (1912), were to be decisive documents in the development of German Expressionism. The first book, as he himself justly claims, ‘became an “Open Sesame” for the formulation of a whole range of questions important to the epoch’—-‘this doctorate thesis of a young and unknown student influenced many personal lives and the spiritual life of a whole era’. 12 Worringer had for the first time given a
karl hofer Girl and Moon. 1923
clear theoretical formulation of the psychological motives that distinguish Northern art from Classical and Oriental art, and the painters that were to constitute the Modern Expressionistic movement could henceforth advance with a confidence based on historical evidence; that is to say, on a tradition with roots in the soil and social evolution of the Transalpine peoples. This Northern tradition is in itself complex, but one fact is decisive—the classical acceptance of the organic world as a serene setting for human efforts, and art as an harmonious reflection of this world (the gay and soothing arm-chair ideal of art which Matisse was to adopt) is not sufficiently expressive for it; ‘it needs rather that uncanny pathos which attaches to the animation of the inorganic’. Hence that tendency to restless abstraction which has always characterized the historical development of art in the North, and which has reappeared with redoubled intensity in our own harsh times; and hence those emotive distortions of natural forms which seek
edvard munch The Dance of Life. i8gg-igoo
to express the unease and terror which man may feel in the presence of a nature fundamentally hostile and inhuman. As rest and clear vision are denied him, his only recourse is to increase his restlessness and confusion to the pitch where they bring him stupefaction and release. ‘The need in Northern man for activity, which is precluded from being translated into a clear knowledge of actuality and which is intensified for lack of this natural solution, finally disburdens itself in an unhealthy play of fantasy. Actuality, which the Gothic man could not transform into naturalness by means of clear-sighted knowledge, was overpowered by this intensified play of fantasy and transformed into a spectrally heightened and distorted actuality. Everything becomes weird and fantastic. Behind the visible appearance of a thing lurks its caricature, behind the lifelessness of a thing an uncanny, ghostly life, and so all actual things become grotesque. . . . Common to all is an urge to activity, which, being bound to no one object, loses itself as a result in infinity.’ 13
james ensor Girl with Doll. 1884
The Founders of Expressionism
There are phrases in this passage which describe all the varieties of Northern Expressionism of our own time. Edvard Munch and James Ensor (1860-1949), Ferdinand Hodler and Vincent van Gogh are all driven by this restless energy to depict ‘a spectrally heightened and distorted actuality’. That is what Expressionism is, and it has absolutely no connexion with the calm refinement of Classical art (the ‘objectified self-enjoyment’ of Theodor Lipps’s famous definition) nor with the mystical remoteness of Oriental art.
Implicit in this Northern attitude is, as Worringer has also pointed out, 14 a tendency to individualization and fragmentation. The ‘personality’ is not cultivated for its social values; instead the ‘individual’ becomes conscious of his, isolation, his separateness, and he may intensify this consciousness to a state of self-denial or self-contempt (we see this clearly in the tragic life of van Gogh). But the more normal outcome of such individuation is the willing isolation of the artist, and his reliance for motive and inspiration on his own subjectivity or introspection.
If we take the precursors and founders of Expressionism in the order of birth, we find eight who were born between 1849 and 1870—Christian Rohlfs (1849), Ferdinand Hodler (1853), James Ensor (i860), Edvard Munch (1863), Alexei von Jawlensky (1864), Wassily Kandinsky (1866), Emil Nolde (1867), and Ernst Barlach (1870)—and all eight were for the most decisive years of their lives struggling in individual isolation, in hostile provincial environments. Rohlfs, who came first, developed slowly, impeded by illness and poverty, working in provincial schools, his style evolving from Naturalism to Impressionism, from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism; only after 1905-6, when he came under the influence of Nolde, did his style take on its full expressionistic vigour. He can, therefore, hardly be called a precursor of Expressionism, though he brought to it the experience of a nature matured in mystical solitude. Hodler was another lonely and mysticizing figure, condemned to isolation and suffering in one of the most unsympathetic environments possible for an artist—Calvinistic Geneva. Ensor lived for most of his long life in the still more
edvard munch The Cry. 1895
CHRISTIAN rohlfs The Artist's Mother,
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emil nolde The Lemoti Grove. 1933
extreme isolation of Ostend, evolving his very individual type of mystical expressionism. Jawlensky and Kandinsky were both born in Russia (near Moscow). Though both had many contacts with younger artists during their lives, they were essentially solitary natures, Kandinsky metaphysical, Jawlensky mystical. Munch, the most dominant influence throughout the whole of Northern Europe, was the most isolated, the most introspective, and the most mordant of all these melancholy natures—he visited Paris occasionally and stayed for longer periods in Germany, but geographically and psychologically he was an ‘outsider’, his nearest parallels being spirits like Kierkegaard and Strindberg,
ernst barlach Rebellion (The Prophet Elias). ig22
Ibsen and Nietzsche. Nolde was another ‘outsider’ of the same race and background as Kierkegaard, lonely, inhibited, morbidly religious. As for Barlach, like Rouault in France, a zeal at once humanistic and religious made him a prophetic figure, an artist depositing incongruous icons in our social wilderness. Nevertheless, his sculpture, his graphic work, and his dramas make him the most typical exponent among all these artists of the innate transcendentalism of this Northern world.
It is typical of artists of this type that they are very conscious of their mission and usually express themselves in literature as well as in their visual arts. Nolde’s autobiographical writings and his letters; 15 Barlach’s several dramas and his autobiography; 16 Kandinsky’s more theoretical works and his poems; Munch’s poems; 17 Hodler’s writings and letters; 18 all these, like the letters of van Gogh, are works of art in their own rights, and not mere documents. 19
Many other artists in Germany, Belgium, and Scandinavia had matured and were fully active during the first decade of the
emil nolde Prophet. 1912
century. For the moment I shall only mention those who offer a fairly close chronological and stylistic parallel to the Fauvists, namely the group that was formed in Dresden in 1905 under the name of Die Briicke (The Bridge). The initiative in the formation of the group was taken by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), originally a student of architecture in Dresden and Munich, but always drawn more and more to the graphic arts. His first experiments (woodcuts) were influenced by Jugendstil, but he too succumbed to the all-pervasive excitement of the decade—NeoImpressionist painting, African and Oriental art, Gauguin and van Gogh. He communicated his enthusiasm to three of his fellow architectural students—first, in 1902, to Fritz Bleyl, then in 1904 to Erich Heckel (b. 1883), and in 1905 to Karl SchmidtRottluff (b. 1884). Other ardsts were soon to become associated with this quartet—Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein in 1906, Kees van Dongen in 1907, Otto Mueller in 1910. But some of these adherents were very temporary—Nolde remained for less than two years, van Dongen for even less time. The Swiss painter Cuno Amiet (b. 1868) and a Finnish painter called Axel
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ernst ludwig kirchner Five Women in the Street, igij
max pechstein Portrait of Dr Paul Fechter. ig2i
Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) were also for a time exhibitors with the group. But there is no doubt that Kirchner, Heckel, SchmidtRottluff and Pechstein were the main piers of the Bridge—they lived together and worked together, shared materials and money and jointly produced those bulletins, catalogues, posters, woodcuts and lithographs which give the group an unusually coherent historical documentation.
The Briicke was dissolved in 1913, by which time perhaps their individual differences were becoming too obvious for a common front; they were also beginning to find a market, and in a competitive economy this places a great strain on group unity. But by 1913 the Expressionistic ferment had spread throughout Germany; Munich in particular had become a centre of activity. Exhibitions multiplied and new influences penetrated from abroad. In Munich, Wassily Kandinsky was elaborating, in theory and practice, that other aspect of Northern sensibility, its ‘impulse to self-alienation’, that primal instinct, as Worringer
otto mueller Gipsies with Sunflowers. ip2y
had called it in 1908, which ‘seeks after pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose within the confusion and obscurity of the world-picture, and creates out of itself, with instinctive necessity, geometrical abstraction’. This was a reaction to the same world-picture that confronted the Expressionists, and in most cases the artists of the new tendency emerged from a preliminary stage of Expressionism. But the main piers of the Bridge were to remain standing. Neither Nolde nor Kirchner, Pechstein nor Schmidt-Rottluff, were ever diverted from their essentially humanistic ideals. In this respect (and in spite of stylistic differences to which I have already referred), they are to be associated with those Fauvists like Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck who resisted the geometrical abstractions of Cubism. Fundamentally they do not differ in style from the Northern Expressionistic artists of the Middle Ages, as Worringer pointed out in Form in Gothic. The illuminated manuscripts and sculptures, the ivories and glass-paintings of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries express the same pathos with similar convulsive distortions, with the same relentless realism. The ideological differences—for in the twentieth century a private introspective mysticism has replaced the collective images of Christian mysticism—only serve to obscure the identity of the visual modes of expression. The works of a modern Expressionist like Barlach, still animated by the religious spirit of the Middle Ages, serve as a poignant demonstration of this fact.
erich heckel Rising Sun. igi4