Expressionism. Ashley Bassie
It provided a blueprint for a whole genre of Expressionist literature revolving around generational conflict, which also included a wider “revolt of the sons against the fathers”, as it came to be known. In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka produced a book of prints and poems called Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys) at the beginning of his career in 1908. It, too, draws upon adolescence as a liminal state of heightened sensitivity, conflict and unresolved yearnings.
With the obvious exception of the work of Egon Schiele in Vienna, it is rare to find painted images of adolescents with such psychological presence. The Brücke works do not represent them merely as undeveloped versions of adults, nor are they sentimentalised. Instead, they have a disconcerting character stemming from the mixture of childhood innocence on the one hand and a developing self-awareness on the other. Brücke bohemianism negated the conventional “shame” of the body and nakedness, but did not replace it with a corresponding “innocence”. In Kirchner’s 1910 portrait of Fränzi in front of a Carved Chair, she stares out at us with a mask-like face. Her form is echoed in the roughly-hewn anthropomorphic chair, which can be seen more clearly in a related pastel drawing. The chair was one of the earliest pieces of Brücke furniture, inspired by Cameroon sources, carved by Kirchner out of limewood planks and painted pink and black. The acid, artificial colours of Fränzi’s face, suggestive of inexpertly daubed make-up, leave room for some ambiguity between playfulness and knowing sophistication. They also contrast ironically with the “flesh” tones of the rough, inanimate chair in a conscious play on nature and artifice. With this slippage, Kirchner implicitly allies the young adolescent with “the primitive”.
In the autumn of 1911, the Brücke artists left the serene, Baroque city of Dresden and moved to Berlin; the bursting, industrial metropolis. The artists began to grow apart. They quarrelled. It seems the final straw was Kirchner’s egocentric account of the Brücke in his Chronik der Brücke (Chronicle of the Brücke) published in 1913. The group’s split was rancorous, far from the spirit of their idyllic summer sorties in the past. But the artists’ search for the longed-for synthesis of man and nature continued during the Berlin years. In 1912, Kirchner sought out a more remote location – returning to a place he knew, the island of Fehmarn, in the Baltic off the Holstein coast. Under the influence of Ajanta wall-paintings, he explored a new sculptural dimension to his painting. The work he did on Fehmarn was decisive for his development. As he put it: “This was where I learned to give form to the ultimate unity of man and nature and completed what I had begun in Moritzburg. The colours became milder and richer, the form stricter”.
Erich Heckel, Day of Glass, 1913.
Oil on canvas, 138 x 114 cm.
Pinakothek der Moderne, Kunstareal München, Munich.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Summer, 1913.
Oil on canvas, 88 x 104 cm.
Sprengel Museum, Hannover.
Striding into the Sea is a positive image of man in dynamic harmony with nature. The sea has baptismal connotations of rejuvenation, cleansing and rebirth. The monumental, even heroic figures step easily and fearlessly over the waves. The bather lying on the beach seems rooted in the shore, like the rocks. The figures here are more purposeful, less playful than in the Moritzburg pictures. The Fehmarn scene is “idyllic”, but in a more profound, utopian sense: it is not a hedonist’s idyll, but articulates a higher, spiritual “unity of man and nature”. Kirchner endowed his bold, universal men and women with serene vitality – those qualities so quickly sapped in the enervating city. In keeping with Expressionism’s growing maturity, the oceanic recuperation monumentalised in paintings such as this can be seen to have fulfilled a more existential need than did the playful excursions to Moritzburg.
At the end of his life, Kirchner wrote that the American poet Walt Whitman had been responsible for his outlook on life. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was translated into German in 1907 and created a sensation. It became a celebrated and vital source for a whole generation of Expressionist painters and poets. The ideal of guiltless, unfettered sexuality and sexual equality found in groups like the Brücke was confirmed by their reading of Whitman. Later, Kirchner described how in times of suffering and hunger in Dresden and after, Leaves of Grass was an abiding source of encouragement.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Man and Woman Striding into the Sea, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 146 x 200 cm.
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart.
A passage from “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass is interesting to consider in relation to Man and Woman Striding into the Sea. Whitman submits himself, naked, to the sea as if it were a lover. In so doing, he expresses ecstatically the longed-for fusion with nature itself that became so central to Expressionist thinking:
You sea! I resign myself to you also… I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;
We must have a turn together… I undress… hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft… rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet… I can repay you.
Sea of stretched ground-swells!
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!
Sea of the brine of life! Sea of unshovelled and always-ready graves!
Howler and scooper of storms! Capricious and dainty sea!
I am integral with you… I too am of one phase and of all phases.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bathers at Moritzburg, 1909–1926.
Oil on canvas, 151.1 x 199.7 cm.
Tate Modern, London.
Indeed, it is noticeable that in many Brücke pictures of this period, men and women are often physically wedged between rocks, into the nooks of tree branches, between the rolling sea’s waves or sprawled on the sand – literally embedded in nature. In a painting made the following summer by Schmidt-Rottluff, the simplified forms, the red of the figures and the dunes as well as the lack of horizon all amplify a comparable sense of archaic synthesis between human beings and nature.
It is also interesting to compare, in this respect, the work of Franz Marc. A key member of the Blaue Reiter circle, and thus engaged in different debates around art, Marc was a painter with an intensely sensitive affinity with nature. However, his response to nature is not mediated by man’s presence in it or by the vitality of the natural body, such as we see in the Brücke works. His work is overwhelmingly concerned with the landscape, the animal kingdom and natural phenomena. There is only an occasional human presence in these landscapes.
Furthermore, his humans, unlike his animals, are strangely ephemeral and undifferentiated. Even when they are physically active – for example, carrying felled timber or bathing in a waterfall – they are oddly passive. They even have a somnambulist quality. Their gaze is downcast, their eyes closed. They neither luxuriate in, nor animate the landscape. In Marc’s work, men and women are either incidental or have no place at all in a world that belongs to his complex, sentient animals. In his Shepherds of around 1911, a telling role reversal has taken place; while the shepherds doze, naked, placid and vulnerable, the horse and cow seem to stand guard and keep watch, quietly alert.
The Brücke’s Rousseauean longings were, indeed, only a part of the wider Expressionist movement’s fascination and engagement with the human form. For all its sexual democracy, belief in ideal equality between the sexes, and rejection of the conventional artist-model relationship, the Brücke nonetheless consisted of male artists focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on the female nude.
Furthermore,