Patrick Bade
German Expressionism: From Die Brucke to Neue Sachlichkeit

Patrick Bade - German Expressionism: From Die Brucke to Neue Sachlichkeit

- [Instructor] Hello everyone. We are going to get started. It is two minutes past, but before we do, I just want to give a little update. We are having some camera difficulty, so you will see the slides shared, Patrick’s lovely visual aids, but no image of Patrick speaking today. So just keep that in mind as you listen to the lecture. Okay. Thank you, Patrick, over to you.

• [Patrick] Thank you very much, Emily. Well, tonight I’m going to be looking at the development of expressionism in Germany from the founding of the Brucke Group in Dresden in 1905, up till 1933, when modern art is effectively shut down overnight by the Nazis. And in this period of just over a quarter of a century, Dresden, Munich, Berlin are really rivals with Paris. They’re at the forefront of everything that’s exciting in modern art. Now, first of all, what is expressionism? Well, I suppose it’s art in which exaggeration and distortion are used for emotional and expressive effect. Before I get into that though, I want to answer a question from last week. Somebody in the questions at the end, they mentioned a picture by Menzel of Christ among the Doctors or The Finding in the Temple, saying that the Jewish scholars surrounding Christ are depicted in a very caricatural way, which could be seen as anti-Semitic. Well, I followed this up and here is the picture. I’m not sure if the original still exists because this is just a, as you can see, a black and white reproduction of the picture. And of course, it’s true. The Jewish doctors or scholars are shown in a rather caricatural way, which you may well think is anti-Semitic. But I would like to point out that this picture belongs to a long tradition. This is quite a frequent subject in Western art and going back to the time of Dürer in the 16th century. And in this tradition, the other examples, there are Flemish examples, there’s Bosch and so on, the doctors are usually depicted in a caricatural way. Here is the early 16th century version of the subject by Albrecht Dürer. So, I think Menzel is just conforming to a pictorial tradition.

I don’t, well, you can make up your own mind, but I don’t see anything in this picture as being, I don’t feel that Menzel is making a strong antisemitic point with this picture. It’s not a very good picture. It’s a rather ugly picture, I think. But going back to Dürer, this also makes a point about German art. You could say that there is, going back to the Middle Ages, in fact and recurring in the Renaissance and the Baroque period, there is a tendency to distort and exaggerate for expressive effect. It seems to be a, a characteristic German trait. But the, and you can, you can see it in both these pictures, one from the early 16th century. This is Grünewald on the left-hand side. And Lovis Corinth, whose late work certainly can be characterised as expressionist with a capital E. But as I’ve already dealt with him, I’m not going to include him otherwise in my talk tonight. Now, the immediate roots of German expressionism were actually in France in the 1880s in the post-impressionist movement. On the right here we have a Gauguin. Gauguin is turning his back on the classical tradition. He’s looking at various kinds of in inverted commas, primitive art, non-European art. He’s painting in a crude way, deliberately crude, rather flat, very strong contours and exaggerating the colours. But the most modern, the most expressionist picture dating from the 1880s is this picture on the left-hand side, which I’m actually, I’m going to see tomorrow afternoon because it’s in an exhibition at the National Gallery about post-impressionism. And it’s by a minor French artist, really, it’s, she’s by far and away his most celebrated work. Most people know nothing else by him except this, which is now belongs to the Musee d'Orsay, by an artist called Paul Sérusier.

And it’s always called the Taliman. And Sérusier was an art student at the Académie Julian in Paris, and in the summer of 1888, he was on holiday in Brittany and he happened to run into Gauguin. At this time he was still painting in a more or less impressionist-stroke-realist way, in otherwise trying to get down on the surface what the eye sees as truthfully as possible. And Gauguin said, “No, no, don’t do this. This is, this is a dead end.” And he took him to a lake with trees around it. And he said, he told him to paint in areas of flat colour and to exaggerate the colours to push them. Don’t try and copy what you see in nature. And so he painted this small picture in, in, when I was a student, it was always said that it was painted on the cigar box lid. But recent analysis, laboratory analysis has shown, it’s not actually a cigar box lid, it was a, a panel bought from an art supply shop. So Sérusier took this picture back to Paris with him, and he showed it to all their friends and they were very excited by it. And his friend Maurice Denis, he wrote a manifesto, which begins with the words that it’s important to remember that a painting, before it represents a nude woman or a horse or whatever, is essentially a flat surface with colours arranged in a certain order. And this was a very fertile, very influential idea. Also dating back to the 1880s. Van Gogh is another key influence on German expressionism. Most of the German expressionist artists felt a very strong affinity with his work. This is a picture painted in the same year, in the summer of 1888 when he went down to Arles, it’s called The Night Cafe. And he, he said, he said in a letter around this time, I use colour arbitrarily to express my feelings forcibly. It’s almost a definition of expressionism. And in a letter about, specifically about this picture, he says that he uses the colours red and green to express the terrible passions of mankind. And he wants you to feel that in this apparently tranquil night cafe, that something terrible could, could happen, a crime could be committed. And a third artist who could seem to be a key, key influence on expressionism is Vardar Munch. I’ve already talked about him in Berlin in the 1890s. His exhibitions there really kickstarted the birth of modern art in Berlin at that time. So he’s another absolute key influence on German expressionism. And he said, I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I saw. So he’s painting his emotional state, his inner feelings rather than trying to capture the sensory perception of the eye.

So the first important expressionist group in Germany is in Dresden, which, which was I suppose a provincial capital. It’s a capital of Saxony, very beautiful city, an art city and a group of young artists, rebellious artists set up this a group under the name of Die Brücke. “Brücke” means the bridge. And it was meant to be a bridge back to the art of the past, the art of Grünewald, Dürer, Lucas Cranach and so on. It was also meant to be a bridge to other art, new art movements around Europe, particularly, of course in Paris. And here is, here are two paintings by Ernst Kirchner. He’s one of the founder members of Die Brücke. And this actually self-portrait on the right hand side with a model. They were true bohemian rebels. They were really into nudism and free love and throwing out the window all traditional Judeo-Christian morality. And you can see these paintings are an absolute explosion of colour, pure, pure colours. Unmodulated taken straight from the paint tube, painted in a very bold, crude, direct way straight onto the canvas. This is Erich Heckel. He’s another founder member of the Brücke group. Self-portrait on the left-hand side. And as you can see, a landscape with a, with a windmill. This is northern Europe, Northern Germany. So these colours, of course, are not in any way naturalistic. They’re extremely forced. And again, this crude direct application of paint onto the surface, another painting. I mean, these are stunning paintings, aren’t they? They’re really, you can imagine at the time, and nobody’s seen anything like this, they must have been really shocking, tremendous energy with which the paint is an expressiveness of which a passion which comes across, these artists, you wonder, oh, what were they on at this time?

They seem to be so hyper. So 1905 is the same year that Fauvism was launched in Paris at the Salon d'Automne. A group of artists, Matisse, La Manche, Dorin, Van Dongen, was shown together in a room at the Salon d'Automne. They all also, in a very, you can see, very similar style because Heckel on the left hand side and La Manche on the right hand side. Did they know each other? My guess is I don’t think it’s actually possible that they knew each other at this point in 1905. They certainly came to know each other because the German artists all went to Paris. And the whole art seemed become very international in the decade leading up to the First World War with artists exhibiting around Europe and even around the world. I think the striking similarities between the Brücke artists and the Fauve artists come from the inspiration of common sources, particularly the ones I’ve already mentioned, van Gogh and Gauguin. So again, an absolutely dazzling painting or with these pure, pure colours by Erich Heckel. A third founder member of the Brücke is Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. These I think are a couple of years later, yes, I can see the date, 1911, 1912. By this time the German artist was certainly very aware of what was happening in Paris. And by this time another, the pictorial revolution has happened in Paris, which is the birth of cubism. And in the angularity of the forms in these two pictures, I think one can see some influence from cubism. So these are two wood cut prints by Erich Heckel, a self-portrait on the right hand side, and a portrait of a Jewish art dealer who played a very important role in supporting all of these artists called Ludwig Shamus on the left hand side. So there is a great revival of interest in graphic art, and some of the best art of the German expressionism of the expression is what we’ve already seen, of course, Keiter Kollwitz who in some ways is related to the expressionists, who’s almost entirely a graphic artist.

So most of these artists were very interested in printmaking and particularly in the medium of woodcut. These are both woodcuts. Woodcut was the first method of printmaking going right back to the 15th century. Of course, Dürer had been a great master of the woodcut. It had fallen into neglect in later generations because it was seen as primitive and crude and more sophisticated methods of printmaking, etching, and finally, lithography were developed. But, the expressionists liked woodcut as a medium, exactly because it is rather crude and primitive. Again, the two artists who launch this renaissance of the woodcut as an art form are Gauguin on the right hand side and Munch on the left. Both of them, of course, inspired by the arrival in Europe from the 1860s onwards of Japanese woodcut prints. And Japanese woodcut prints, unlike Europeans, are cut with the grain instead of of against the grain. Traditionally in Europe, right up to this time, all woodcut prints were cut against the grain. So the grain of the wood doesn’t actually show up in the image. Where if you look at a Japanese woodcut print, in when there’s a large flat area of colour, sky, sea, whatever, you’ll will see patterns of the grain of the wood. And both Gauguin and Munch liked this and made use of it. And you know, you have a real sense of the woodiness of the woodcut in Munch on the left hand side, Gauguin on the right hand side. Another very important artist, very, very influential on all the German artists as far as graphic art is concerned, is the Swiss Nabis artists, Felix Vallotton, who used these very bold, large, simplified flat forms, in his case, black and white.

So that’s Vallotton on the right hand side and Kirchner on the left. And two more splendid woodcut prints by Kirchner, where in both cases, of course, you have a very strong sense of the texture and the material of the wood. More woodcut prints by, by Kirchner. And it, it’s very interesting that just around this time, 1906, 1907, that simultaneously in Germany and in France, there’s a great interest in African art. African art was quite easily accessible in, in Paris, Berlin and other European cities. But Europeans, by and large hadn’t seen African art as art with a capital A for them its sole interest was ethnographic. So you wanted to see African masks, carved masks, you had to go to a museum of natural history or ethnography rather than to art museum. But suddenly, Picasso, Matisse, Durin, and all these German artists are flocking to ethnographic museums. And I think you’ve in this, particularly in this print, by Kirchner on the right hand side, you can see a very strong influence of African sculpture. So the, the Brücke group lasts quite a long time, almost up to the First World War. And it, it attracts recruits. This is Emil Nolde. He, I think he joined about 1906. There’s a self-portrait on the left hand side. He was actually half a generation or more older than the other artists. He was born at the beginning of the 1860s. I would say he’s a more painterly painter than most of his German colleagues. By painterly, I mean what the French would call belle peinture. That means, obviously, colour is very important in that, but it’s more the beauty lusciousness of the way that the paint is applied to the surface. This you can see is a biblical subject. It’s the worship of the golden calf. This is a painting, to me, very funny in very delightful painting by Nolde, by Emil Nolde.

And it’s, I think she just might be my favourite Christian saint. This is St Mary of Egypt. And according to Catholic tradition, she, she was the prostitute, but eventually realised that her cell by date was coming up and she’d better, you know, smarten up her act and she wants to go to the holy land and she has no money. So, she has to work her passage, so to speak, by servicing the sailors, having non-stop sex with the sailors on the boat all the way to the holy land. And then she arrives in the holy land and she’s so exhausted that she steps onto the holy land and keels over it and dies and is made a saint immediately. There are a fair number of artists who’ve painted her. She was popular in Spain. But if you look at Spanish 17th century paintings of her, she’s always looking rather tired and exhausted from her ordeal on the ship. But she seems to be having a rather good time in this painting by Emil Nolde. Again, to make the point of the way that French artists and German artists, the fauve and the expressionists, are running along parallel lines. And this is a Durin on the left hand side, so that’s French and a painting by Nolde of his garden on the right hand side. So, you know, really quite strong similarities, I think, between the two artists. Now, there’s a great irony here, because as I said, the Nazis, when they come to power, they hate pretty well all forms of modern art. Hitler gave a notorious speech, which we have a recording at the Nuremberg rally in 1934.

And he denounces, cubism expressionism, all these different modernisms. And nearly all the artists I’m talking about tonight found that their works were banned. I mean, they had been accepted. Their works were in museums all over Germany, up up to 1933. German museums were amongst the most important collectors of modern art. Germans were very open to modern art. But all these modern paintings, in 1930, from 1933 onwards, they were confiscated and removed from public display. Those that could be sold abroad were sold to raise cash for the Nazi regime. But a great many of them were actually destroyed. Now, the huge irony about showing you these two pictures together is that whereas modern art was so frowned upon and banned in Germany, during the occupation, the Germans were far more tolerant of the, of what was going on in France. And particularly the former fauve artists, Durin, la Manche, Van Dongen, were all courted by the Nazi regime and invited to go on a goodwill visit to Berlin in 1945. And Dara, who painted that picture on the left-hand side, admittedly by this time he’s not painting with quite such vibrant colours. He’s still a modern artist. And I find it curious. I mean, there are so many inconsistencies really in Nazi policies towards modern art and modern music. Whereas Nolde on the right hand side found himself under what the Nazis called a malverbot. He was forbidden not only to exhibit his work, he was forbidden to paint, even in private. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

Now, here again, things become even more complicated because Nolde was a real believer in Nazism. He was a member of the Nazi party. He was horribly antisemitic. Artists who he didn’t like, he would denounce them as Jews, whether they were Jewish or not. So quite a nasty piece of work, but it was, it was a shock to him, of course, when the Nazis actually took power, having been a member of the Nazi party, that they didn’t like his work and that they banned it. He’d done very well for himself under the, in the Weimar period. And his, his paintings sold for large sums of money, and he was eagerly collected by German museums. But like the others, all his works were confiscated from museums and many of them were destroyed by the Nazis. He had this beautiful country house in Schleswig, Holstein, right up at the top of Germany, close to the Danish border, where the landscape is quite flat. But his house was on a slight hill, which was useful to him because he could keep a watch out for anybody approaching. It was rather a remote house. And as I said, he was forbidden, strictly forbidden to paint, even in private. And this was something that was monitored. So it meant that he could not paint in oils because, well, obviously oils would be, they’re sticky, slow drying, they’d be hard to put away and the smell would stay behind and they’d know that he’d been painting. So instead, he concentrated during the years of the Second World War on watercolours. And he is, it’s, this is another, these things have cropped up so many times in lectures, haven’t they? Wagner, Degas, Gauguin, all these people who have views that are repellent to us. And, and Nolde, as I said, a very, very extreme case. So what do we do with this? These are gorgeous, what can I say? I think he’s one of the supreme masters of the technique of watercolour. He’s right up there with Turner.

Such a difficult medium to control that’s so unpredictable, you know, with colours bleeding into one another and so on. And these are absolutely heart-stoppingly beautiful, dazzling images. He was a favourite artist of Angela Merkel. She had works by Nolde in her office in Berlin until somebody pointed out to her his political views and she had them removed. Now we move on to Max Pechstein. He’s also a somewhat belated member of the Brücke group with a style that is perhaps a little bit more conservative, less wild than the other Brücke artists I’ve talked about. Here he is in his house, and as you can see, when this photograph was taken, he was doing very well. He became a professor in an academy. His, again, his works were widely collected by wealthy collectors and by museums. Two works by Max Pechstein. He is very directly influenced by both Gauguin and Van Gogh. You can see the obvious reference to Van Gogh in the painting on the right hand side and the stylistic relationship to Gauguin. He even went off following Gauguin’s footsteps to the South Seas. And like many of these German artists, he’s very.. well, he’s keen on Nudism, and very keen on this idea of a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature. This is still a very… I think it’s a big deal in Germany. Germany, Germans have quite a, I can tell you, a very, very different attitude to nudity from English people, let alone Americans. If you go to Munich in, in the summer, it’s a park right in the centre of Munich, very idyllic, beautiful park, and you’ll see these completely nude, bronzed, beautiful, Aryan types, cavorting, playing ball and leaping into the Eisbach.

It’s a fast moving stream that comes from the mountains. And even on the hottest day, it’s icy cold. It’s an incredible sight really, to walk through the centre of a big modern city, and see scenes actually very like the one I’m showing you on the screen. I have to tell you, that would’ve been what, 40 years ago or more. One day I was walking through the English garden. I was so overcome by this that I whipped off my clothes and jumped into Eisbach and I quickly regretted it, because two minutes later I was half a mile down the stream. And it was a long, and for me, rather embarrassing walk back to collect my clothes. Here’s another painting by Max Pechstein. And this is also an opportunity to mention a very wonderful South African artist called Irma Stern. And she was from German Jewish background and she went to train in Germany, actually during the First World War. And from 1917 she was a pupil of Max Pechstein. And I think you can see very clearly the relationship between her work and his. Another artist sort of very much engaged with this ideal of harmony of man and nature, and nude bodies in nature. This is Otto Mueller. A rather different technique. He uses distemper, that’s a glue-based paint rather than oil-based paint. And, and he gives you, of course, a very matte, slightly chalky surface that looks a bit like a fresco. Now to return to Ernst Kirchner, all of this, as I said, starts in Dresden. But Dresden is, was and is, I suppose, a middle-sized rather provincial town. Berlin is really taking off as a major, as an art city, and as it’s a Gross-Stadt in a way that Dresden isn’t. 1911 is a important year for the art scene in Berlin. It’s a year, I mentioned last time that Der Sturm was set up. This art, a very exciting art gallery that goes right until 1932, founded by Herwarth Walden. And 1911 is the year that Kirchner arrives in Berlin.

There’s a change in his art cause he’s very excited by the big city. And this theme, actually, which had first been developed as early as the 1860s in Paris, of life in the big city and urban alienation. This sense of being in a place where there’s millions of people and you, everybody’s… there’s movement, there’s agitation. People are passing each other in the street without necessarily making eye contact. And this is something I think is conveyed very powerfully in Kirchner’s paintings between 1911 and the outbreak of the First World War. Now the First World War is of course, so enormous in its consequences. And these are young artists, so inevitably, Kirchner and others I’m talking about tonight were conscripted. He very rapidly had a very severe nervous breakdown and was invalided out of the German army. This is a picture painted from his experience, or, it’s a communal shower for soldiers. I remember in 1985 there was a groundbreaking exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. I’ve mentioned before that the British tend to not like German art. They tend not to like expressionism. And this, there was this idea, it’s been mentioned by both me and people who’ve written in at the end of lectures that in, in Britain that if it didn’t happen in France, it didn’t happen. So that exhibition, it was in 1985. It was a royal at the Royal Academy. It was a survey of German art from Die Brücke, right up to the 1980s. And it was, I think, a kind of wake up call for many people that there was, that German art was much, much more interesting than people had assumed. But this was the very first picture in the exhibition, and it was in a small room on its own. And you walked into that room and you were confronted by this picture before you went onto the rest of the exhibition. And I can still remember the impact this picture had, that it really stopped people in their tracks. They were shocked by it, mesmerised by it. And of course many people were making the association with the gas chambers of the Second World War.

So in one sense, of course that’s wrong because this painting was painted in 1915, long before the gas chambers were conceived, or thought of or used. In another sense, I think that it’s exactly the emotion that this picture wants you to have. It’s an image of loss of individuality, of degradation that Kirchner obviously felt as a conscripted soldier. And he never actually recovered from this. I mean, this is a painting about the same date, where, which is a self-portrait, the title is Self-Portrait with a Severed Hand. He didn’t actually lose his hand, physically, but metaphorically, he never really recovered. And although he limped on in a very poor health and mental and physical until 1937, he certainly didn’t paint anything very good after the Second World War. And like all the other artists I’m talking about tonight, he was pillared by the Nazis. His works were exhibited in the degenerate art exhibition in 1937. And that was a shock. That was too much for him, and he committed suicide. Now we moved down to Munich and the Blue Rider Group. And this is a painting by Kandinsky. Munich has the greatest collection of his early work, stunning, stunning collection in the Lenbachhaus. Kandinsky was born into the Russian bourgeoisie, he was trained as a lawyer. He was a very successful lawyer and even became a professor of law at Moscow University. But, very belatedly, at the age of 30, in 1896, he had two great cultural experiences, which completely transformed his life. First of all, he went to a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin. And it was particularly the wonderful orchestral prelude to act one, were shimmering orchestral colour. It begins in a kind of formless way, there’s no melody, no counterpoint, nothing like that, it’s just shifting orchestral colours. And he saw it in terms of colour. He had an almost sort of visionary experience.

So, this, it’s said, was what convinced him of the power of art. And in the same year he went to an exhibition in Moscow of paintings of Haystacks by Monet. And he said, he walked into the room, there’s these blazing colours of these amazing pictures by Monet. And so when he first walked in, he couldn’t actually even recognise what was represented. He only saw the blazing shimmering colour. And he said that that was the grain, the first grain sewn in his mind, that colour can be an expressive in itself and doesn’t have to represent anything. He’s a great believer in… He’s a great mystic, like several of the pioneers of abstract art, very influenced by the ideas of theosophy, pseudo Messiah or prophet, Madam Blavatsky, in the the last part of the 19th century, who launches the theosophical movement, which is the movement that believes that there is common ground between all the world great religions. Between Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, all that kind of thing, but the key thing for the artists was the belief that the real physical world that you can touch, taste, see, is an illusion, and that there is some kind of higher spiritual reality. And the artist’s job was to communicate that higher truth, not to copy the physical world. On the right hand side is an illustration from a book that came around, out about the turn of the century called Thought Forms, in which various emotional spiritual states are translated into colour and abstract pattern. When I was a student at the court old in the 1970s, we had a talk from a very distinguished scholar called Peter Werger, who was virulently refuting the idea that Kandinsky could have been in influenced by Mrs. Annie Besant and the Reverend W. Leadbeater.

Of course, it sounded like, “How could this great Russian painter, how could he be influenced by an English housewife, and a vicar. But, I must say as soon as the images went up on the screen, I thought, "Whoa, of course he was, of course he was influenced.” It doesn’t diminish his achievement or make him less interesting. I mean, a great artist can take ideas from all over the place and run with them and develop them. So, he goes to Munich, he gives up his career in law, and he goes to Munich, and it seems a chief attraction of Munich at this time was the reputation of this artist, Franz von Stuck. Self-portrait on the right hand side, and his most famous or notorious painting, Sin, on the left hand side. Again, it seems kind of odd to us, because most people today would dismiss Stuck as ludicrous kitch. So it’s bizarre to us that he attracted so many young artists, Klee and Kandinsky. Jawlensky, de Chirico wanted to be one of his pupils, but was rejected. So in the early years of the 20th century, Kandinsky is in Munich, and he seems to be working for, but say between 1900 and 1910, often into parallel styles. There’s one that comes out of impressionism and post-impressionism, like the image you see on the left hand side, which is a landscape and one that seems to come out pre-Raphaelitism and symbolism of legendary and fantastic subject matter and very stylized, a bit art nouveau. So these are two paintings by the same artist from around the same time, but in very different styles. This is his 1903 painting entitled The Blue Rider. And he and the artist who were grouped around him liked this painting so much. It is a wonderful painting, a dazzling painting. And so, they took it as their mascot and then they called themselves the Blue Rider Group.

So Kandinsky went completely native when he went to Bavaria, you can see he’s wearing Bavarian traditional clothing. There he is with his mother, she was on a visit to Munich. And on the left, a painting of him by his partner and lover, Gabriele Münter. Somebody was asking about her, why I didn’t include her in the last lecture. Well, for a whole variety of reasons. One is that you know, you need to restrict. I can see I’m not going to, I’m going to run out of time on this lecture, that’s for sure. But also I think, you know, she’s somebody I’m very grateful to, and I’ll explain that in a minute. But I don’t really think she was a terrific artist. She was very much in the shadow of Kandinsky. Both of them, incidentally, very, as I said, she was from the north of Germany, she wasn’t from Bavaria either, but both were very interested in Bavarian rural folk culture. And, in particular, a tradition in Bavaria of what they called “hinter glas malerei”, that’s painting on the back of glass. This is a Kandinsky working in the manner of a Bavarian folk artist. Here is Gabriele Münter, again, self-portrait, and on the right, her painting of house in Murnau on the foothills of the Alps that she bought as a summer house and where she and Kandinsky lived and worked. And here is a painting by, a very attractive painting, by Gabriele Münter, but it’s very close, as you can, see this painting by, by Kandinsky painted at the same time. To my mind, she’s always a little bit overshadowed by him. She, she doesn’t work with quite the same brilliance and vibrancy that he does. These are such ecstatic paintings, such gorgeous paintings. We are so lucky to have them. And I tell you why, because in 1914, of course when the First World War broke out, Kandinsky has to leave.

And he goes back to Russia and he breaks up with Gabriele Münter and he finds a younger woman who he falls in love with in Russia, ans he marries her. So, that was the end of their relationship. But he had left all his early work with her. Now there would be some vengeful women who would of course burn it or chuck it out or whatever. She didn’t, she guarded it all the way through the period of the Weimar Republic. And when the Nazis came to power, of course if they could have got hands on it, they would’ve burnt it all. She hid it. And she must have hidden it very well in her house because she was raided three times by Nazis in search of degenerate art that they wanted to confiscate and burn. But she, and were also very lucky, of course, that it wasn’t, could so easily have been destroyed by allied bombs. But it got, she got to the end of the war with all this collection intact. Kandinsky had died at the end of the war in France. And his widow then claimed these pictures. And Gabriele Münter said, “No.” She was an old lady by this time, and she gave the work to the city of Munich, it was a big law case. And I’m glad to say that Munich won. So if you want to see it, come with me to Munich. It’s really one of the great highlights of a visit to Munich is to go to the Lenbachhaus and see these absolutely amazing, amazing paintings. 1910, he publishes his famous essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he predicts that art will will become abstract. And that abstract art is the highest form of art. So between 1910, 1914, he paints a series of landscapes which become increasingly abstract. What you can see on the screen now is not totally abstract, it is abstracted, shall we say, but he’s moving closer and closer. So by 19, these pictures are of 1914, and of course, you’ve got to work, there are, I think if you really work at it, still some representational elements, particularly in the one on the right hand side. I can see a boat, I can see a pier. But you are hovering on the brink of abstraction. Huh, dear, yes, I’m running out of time.

This is Alexej Jawlensky and perhaps his most famous Blue Rider picture, portrait of a Russian dancer on the right hand side. He actually arrived in Munich before Kandinsky. He arrived two years before, but he was somebody with many international connections. He was friendly with Matisse. And you can see again, very strong similarity, I think. That’s Jawlensky on the left, Matisse on the right. And this is a mature painting by Jawlensky. He, his partner is Marianne Werefkin. Somebody was asking about her last time. This is her self portrait and painting by Marianne Werefkin, the other two, so the two initial main figures in the Blue Rider Group are Russians living in Munich. The other two are, the other two very important figures, Marc and Macke, are German, but Macke, whose work you see on the screen comes from the Rhineland and mainly worked in the Rhineland, but exhibited, he was friendly with France Marc and he exhibited with a Blue Rider. A wonderful, wonderful painter. And again, I say rather like Emil Nolde, he is a painterly painter, and a sensuous painter in an almost French way. He, yes, has engagement with the, the sensuous beauty of the real world. So he’s not a mystic, he’s not rejecting the material world in the way that, say, Kandinsky did. Or, and to some extent his friend Franz Marc as well, a tremendous, tremendous talent. Tragically cut short. He was conscripted in 1914 and he died. He was killed almost immediately on the western front. He was one of the first people to die in the First World War. And also his great friend, Franz Marc, who, there are parallels here with Kandinsky, he was into mysticism into theosophy.

His particular form of, his type of mysticism took the form of pantheism, seeing God and spirituality in nature and in animals. This is his final masterpiece. The Fate of Animals, painted in 1914. A work which many have seen as a premonition of the horror of the First World War. He was killed at the Battle of Elda. No, this, I’m really running out of time. But I will make a little start. Now, the First World War is this huge watershed, changes absolutely everything and Germany is defeated. So, however terrible it was for the British and the French, dreadful for the French. I mean, everywhere you go in France, of course, you see these memorials with endless lists of names. Millions of young men who were killed in the First World War. Surely the most wasteful, the most stupid war that has ever been. And we wouldn’t have the Second World War or the Holocaust, either, without the First World War. So, there’s a very strange mood in Berlin. So, I may have to transfer quite a lot of what I was going to talk about tonight into my next lecture because, as I said, I’m going to run out of time. But here, we’re into the Weimar Republic, they’ve got rid of Kaiser Wilhelm and Berlin becomes the new Babylon where anything goes. And these, these, I suppose, are the two iconic images. If you want to conjure up Weimar Republic Berlin it’s going to be Otto Dix, The Lesbian Journalist, Sylvia von Harden on the right hand, left-hand side, or the famous image of Marlene in The Blue Angel, on the right-hand side. So it’s still, it’s a what we get, I’m going to talk, I was going to talk, and we’ll talk next time, about a particular brand of expressionism, which the Germans called Neue Sachlichkeit, which is quite hard to translate. Neue Sachlichkeit is new sometimes called new realism, new objectivity. It’s expressionist in that it contains, obviously, elements of distortion and caricature exaggeration. But it’s tough, hard edged. Hard edge is a key thing.

If you think of those paintings by Kandinsky, I’ve shown you, which is so unbelievably luscious and gorgeous. And also the Emil Nolde. No lusciousness here, no self-indulgence. This is George Grosz. My feeling is that he was always a rather screwed up young man. Bitter, not happy in his skin. These are actually early works by him. The, before, the First World War, of grim reality of one kind or another. This ugliness of the modern Berlin on the left hand side, domestic violence and degraded poverty on the right hand side. And there is… He’s obviously talented, but he doesn’t, at this point, have a very individual voice. There are plenty of other illustrators from the period working in this kind of style. He doesn’t have a new way of saying these things. He gets it through the First World War. It’s funny, the First World War, because it kills a lot of artists. Huge amount of talent is, is just wasted. There are plenty of artists and musicians who thrived before the war who never really accommodated themselves to the new reality after the war. There were many artists, musicians who fell silent after the war. But there were other young artists, I mean, in this country, somebody like Paul Nash or even Stanley Spencer to an extent, who in a way found their voice through the war. And this is particularly true, I would say, of George Grosz, who develops this style of, you can see he’s actually using a ruler to… And making these little, very dehumanised figures, really, with this kind of mechanised method of drawing, using a ruler. Two angry subjects here, the one is, is the one on the left hand side is called the riot of the insane.

That’s his comment, I think, on the insanity of the First World War. And the one on the right hand side shows a medical inspection, which everybody had to go through. This is one of those degrading things I think for, you know, middle class young men that had to go and strip naked and be inspected medically before being inducted into the army. And you can see this is a corpse that’s being inducted into the army. He was, obviously had a rich fantasy life, as you can tell from these two photographs that he had taken of himself. Well, on the left as an American gangster. And on the right he’s with his girlfriend, later wife, he’s showing himself as Jack the Ripper, a sex murderer. And so he’s, he’s a pretty, as I said, a complicated guy. Angry. He’s angry, I think, and funny enough, I think anger is the source of the inspiration of his best work. A gesture of anger was that he changed the spelling of his name during the First World War, while Germany is at war with Britain, America. He changed his name from Georg, the German version, to George, the Anglo Saxon version. This is his denunciation of the absolutely cretinous patriotism, exaggerated chauvinism that led to the First World War. You can see these two people who aren’t human, they just have speakers coming out of their necks. And they’re shouting mindless slogans. , “A bullet for every Russian”. , and I can’t quite translate that joke. But, so, coming out of the First World War, he has a brief phase, Dada phase. Dada, which is, it was a movement that actually sprung up in neutral Switzerland, in Zurich during the war of disaffected artists and poets who are rejecting the war. It’s kind of anti-art. So nothing, it’s not meant to be aesthetically pleasing at all. And again, you’ve got this rather sort of industrial, hard-edge style, and here, a use of collage. But I can see I’m really running out of time.

So, maybe I’ll just finish George Grosz. He’s most famous, after having gone through that Dada phase. He’s most famous for his Neue Sachlichkeit images. Caricatural, bitter acerbic comment on German society. He looks around him with a sense of utter repulsion and disgust. And he’s angry. He’s, at this point, he’s a member of the Communist Party and… these are clearly very political. Denunciation of war profiteers and capitalists, I mean, that’s a really hateful image of a capitalist on the right hand side, with his phallic cigar clutched to the front of his soldiers. And you see on the left, the poor people who’ve been exploited by these war profiteers who’ve got rich on the misery of other people. His loathing in hatred for the bourgeoisie comes through in these images. But I think Bertolt Brecht hit the nail on the head, actually, when he wrote a, a critique of George Grosz’s work. You know, Bertolt Brecht, of course, a communist and believed in the ideal of the left. And he looked at Grosz’s work and said, no, this guy is not motivated by the milk of human kindness and a desire to improve the lot of humanity. He is motivated by loathing and hate. So, when he finally moves to America, I mean, he sees the danger of the Nazis in 1932, and takes up a job in America and then spends most of the rest of his life in America. The source of his anger and hatred is taken away and his art loses all its intensity. Right, well, I’m going to then, I was going to move on to Otto Dix, but I’ll save him for my next lecture and I will see what you have to say.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, it’s so interesting, Carol. You’re quite right. Of course, the great Christian painters always depict Jesus as blonde and Aryan-looking, with the one great exception, of course, of Rembrandt.

A colour fiesta. Yes. That’s what it should be, I think, well, because Kandinsky is the ultimate colour fiesta.

Oh, Ron, yes. I’m looking forward to that very much tomorrow before I go back to Paris. Thank you Nicola. I’ll look out for that. The prostitute who, who, that’s St. Mary of Egypt. And you, if you Google her, you’ll find lots of paintings of her. Actually, the one I really, really love, it’s by the Spanish artist, Rivera. He actually painted her several times. She always looks completely knackered and exhausted in his paintings as she would be, I suppose.

Irma Stern, was your grandfather’s sister. She’s such a good artist. She really deserves a lecture to herself. I’d have to really think whether I could do it, because I admire her work, but I only know it from reproductions. I’ve never seen any originals. British don’t like anything diff- Yeah, yeah, it’s true. I don’t know. But there then of course there are a lot of British people who don’t like anything French, either. Lots of British people who don’t like anything outside these islands.

South, of one South American artist. Did I talk about a South American artist? South African? Irma Stern, I think that was probably. It’s S-T-E-R-N.

You’re saying many to me are a fraction away from the degenerate art, but, and I’m not quite sure what you’re saying with that. Right. Have I come to the end?

And Peter Kollwitz, of course, yes. Right, that seems to be it. And next time, which will be a week today, I’ll be speaking to you from my Paris flat and I hope I will have had the camera issue sorted out.

Thank you. Bye-bye.