The Roots of German Expressionism and Beyond

[Michael Kerpan]

Expressionism (in art) is one of my very favorite movements (especially on its earlier end -- once things get totally abstract I tend to lose interest). While I love the Blue Reiter folks, I love the Austrians (especially Klimt and Schiele) too. The French Fauvists also created lots of wonderful work (I'm always a sucker for Roualt). I never saw much of a connection between cinematic expressionism and expressionism in the (non-moving) visual arts. I wonder if there really are any films that embody a wider array of painterly expressionist principles/techniques? Maybe in animated stuff?

[Mr Sausage]

Same as you, I'm a big fan of Expressionism in art, and love Klimt and Schiele as well. I also love the New Objectivists, especially Dix, and surrealists like Max Ernst. Whatever the Nazis threw into their degenerative art exhibit, I'm a huge fan of essentially. 1900 - 1933 was a magical time for art in the German-speaking world.

[knives]

I don’t know if you are laser focused on the German part of expressionism, but there’s a rather pleasant documentary hosted by Vincent Price about Marc Chagall that touches on the topic of diversity within expressionism and the use of bright shocking colors.

[Michael Kerpan]

I love the fact that early expressionism involved inter-connection of artists across Europe -- from Russia to France (a big fan of Javlensky, for instance). Also there seems to be a connection to the late "post-expressionists (for instance the Nabis -- like Serusier -- an artist woefully unrepresented in US museums). European art in the 1900-30 is so incredibly rich. I wonder whether Renoir might (at least sometimes) capture some of the spirit of this movement during this era?

[Mr Sausage]

I’m reading the book Wittgenstein’s Vienna and came across this passage:

The values which this society cherished were reason, order and progress, perseverance, self-reliance and disciplined conformity to the standards of good taste and action. The irrational, the passionate and the chaotic were to be avoided at all costs. [italics mine]

One key thing Expressionist film shares with Expressionist painting is an embrace of “the irrational, the passionate and the chaotic” against the reason, order, and tradition of empire (be it Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, or what have you). In film you see this in an embrace of themes like madness, dreams, shadows, magic, and folk- and fairy-tales, told in a style that abandons rationally structured and ordered compositions for ones based on jagged, angular lines that suggest chaos and disorder. They are worlds that are irrational, founded not on tradition but passionate, even crazed emotion.

You see something of the same in the paintings. They’re not so jagged and psychotic, but they embrace passion and non-rational emotion to such an extent that the landscapes and objects nominally represented almost fade into unreality beside the force of the artist’s emotional expressiveness. Calm, rationally ordered compositions give way to flattened compositions full of inexplicable angles. Passion and emotion generate unnatural colour schemes of such wildness that contemporary bourgeois viewers thought they were seeing the outpourings of a disordered mind. The personal and the transformative was prioritized, while conformity and tradition disappear.

There is an embrace of disorder and even primitivism in the Expressionists of either medium. They are artworks against, or if not against then indifferent to, the order and conventions of traditional civilization. Tho’ now very much important parts of western art traditions, I wonder what our current mavens of order and civilization would make of them. I’d like to think these reactionaries would reject them as bitterly as did the reactionaries of the time. I guess I’d like to think these paintings and films still have the capacity to disrupt and provoke. One of my rare optimisms. But this art seems to me as important as ever, a reminder that these artists, too, were accused of portending the end of western civilization, often by those who’d go on to try to realize that very end themselves.

[Michael Kerpan]

I feel like expressionist art is very much aligned (in many respects) with (at least some) surrealist cinema (as much as it is aligned with expressionist cinema) and also with magical realist literature. All of this is pretty indispensable (in MY opinion).