Expressionism

Essay by invisible_girlHigh School, 12th grade March 2004

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EXPRESSIONISM

The year 1905 saw art get a double start, for the French Fauves weren't the only artists breaking new ground in that year. In 1905 in Dresden, Germany, a group of artists came together to form another art movement. They called their group Die Brucke, which means the bridge. They saw their art as a bridge uniting all ideas of the new generation of German artists. The founders of the movement, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt Rotttluff, and Fritz Bleyl, were later joined by others, such as Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde. These artists sought to express themselves and the world condition with their art. Their movement was soon described as Expressionism.

The approach of the German Die Brucke artists differed somewhat from the Fauve outlook, which exploited the expression of art itself. The German Expression used art to express the world and the personal relationship of each artist to it.

Consequently, the emotions found in German Expressionism are much more intense than those of Fauve art.

The Expressionists united as Die Brucke displayed deep and open feelings in their art. A second Expressionist group modified their artistic emotions. They had their first show in Munichin 1913. Not all of these artists were Germans. They included two Russians, Wassily Kandinsky and Alex von Jawlensky, and a Swiss, Paul Klee. Other members of the Munich movement, such as Franz Marc, were German. The munich artists were so varied in their approach that Klee's arthas also been described as Surrealistic, a subject for another chapter. Kandinsky"s experiments led to Abstract-Expressionism, the major American movementof the 1950s, which you will read about later. It was Kandinsky who gave this group their name, Der Blaue Reiter, meaning the Blue Horseman, the title of one of his paintings.

Though Die...