Expressionism

On 7 June 1905, four architecture students in Dresden, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, founded a group they called Die Brücke, the Bridge, a bridge to the future. That same autumn the Fauves showed in Paris. In Munich in 1911, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, and the word Expressionism came into use around the same time.

The First World War broke it apart. August Macke was killed in September 1914, at twenty-seven, and Franz Marc at Verdun in 1916; Egon Schiele died of the Spanish flu in 1918, at twenty-eight. In 1937 the Nazis seized Expressionist paintings from German museums and mocked them in their exhibition of Degenerate Art. Kirchner, hundreds of whose works were taken, took his own life in Switzerland the next year.

Die Brücke painted with harsh color and angular, simplified shapes, and revived the woodcut. Its members painted nudes by the Moritzburg lakes outside Dresden, then moved to Berlin in 1911, where Kirchner painted the city's streets and its women in feathered hats, sharp-edged and nervous, as in Berlin Street Scene and Potsdamer Platz. The group broke up in 1913.

Der Blaue Reiter was more spiritual. Franz Marc painted animals in symbolic color, blue for the spiritual and yellow for the gentle, as in Blue Horse I. August Macke painted strollers, shop windows and zoos in bright, calm color, as in Woman in Green Jacket. Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1911 and moved step by step from landscapes at Murnau to Composition VII of 1913, among the first wholly abstract paintings. Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin worked beside them.

Edvard Munch's anxious pictures of the 1890s, The Scream above all, were the movement's starting point, and he painted on into the 1940s, as in his Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu of 1919. In Vienna, Egon Schiele drew bodies thin, twisted and exposed, and painted himself again and again, as in Self-Portrait with Physalis and its companion Portrait of Wally. In the artists' village of Worpswede, Paula Modersohn-Becker painted simple, monumental figures before she died in 1907, at thirty-one.

In the 1920s German painters such as Otto Dix and George Grosz turned its anger into the cold, exact satire of the New Objectivity. Kandinsky and Klee taught at the Bauhaus. After the Second World War, painters in New York took its belief that a painting should carry raw feeling into Abstract Expressionism, and in the 1980s Neo-Expressionism brought its rough, violent brushwork back again.