Expressionism

Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954), Woman with the Hat, 1905, oil on canvas, 2’7 x 2’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fauvism

Henri Matisse, Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908-1909, 5’11” x 8’1,” State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Fauvism

Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1876-1907: 31 years) (right), Self Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Day, 1906, oil on board, 101 cm high. During the artist’s final (1906) stay in Paris she painted a series of nude self portraits, unprecedented by a woman artist and considered the most historically significant works of her short career.

(left) Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace, 1906(right) Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women, 1899, oil on canvas, 37 x 28 in.

Modersohn-Becker, Reclining Mother and Child, 1906 (lower right) Paul Gauguin, Nevermore, 1897

(left) William Bouguereau, Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist c. 1890. (right) Paula Modersohn-Becker, Reclining Mother and Child, 1906

Edvard MunchMadonna, lithograph1895

Käthe Kollwitz (German 1867-1945), Woman with Dead child, 1903, etching with engraving overprinted with a gold tone plate, 47.6 x 41.9 cmPaula Modersohn-Becker (German 1876-1907), Reclining Mother and Child, oil on canvas, 124.7 x 82 cm. 1906 (right)

The maternal nude, a new subject in the history of Western art

Käthe Kollwitz, The Volunteers, 1924, woodcut. Part of the War Cycle

Käthe Kollwitz, Mothers (left), 1924; (right) Nie Wieder Kreig! (No More War!), litho poster for the Social Democratic Party, 1924

Vassily Kandinsky (Russian 1866-1944)

The artist is not born to a life of pleasure. He must not live idle; he has a hard work to perform, and one which often proves a cross to be borne. He must realize that his every deed, feeling, and thought are raw but sure material from which his work is to arise, that he is free in art but not in life....The artist is not only a king...because he has great power, but also because he has great duties.

Vassily Kandinsky, "Conclusion"Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912

Kandinsky developed his theory and practice of abstract expressionist art between 1908 - 1911: three years.

(left) Vassily Kandinsky, The Blue Mountain, 1908, o/c (right) Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1906

Kandinsy’s Fauve (style) symbolist landscapes

(right) Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater (Theosophist), Thought-Form: Music of Wagner 1905, (left) Kandinsky, Mountain, 1908

Towards abstract painting

(left) Vassily Kandinsky, Murnau: View with Railroad and Castle, 1909, oil on cardboard

Kandinsky, Church in Murnau, 1910, Oil on cardboard

Towards abstraction - Kandinsky’s visual thinking

Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Composition 2, 1909-10, oil on canvas, 38 x 51”,

Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NYC. Based on the Deluge (Genesis) and (Apocalypse) Revelations

Wassily Kandinsky, 1911, Composition IV, o/cobjective forms are “veiled” and “dissolved”

"I more or less dissolved the objects so that they could not all be recognized at

once, and so that their psychic sounds could be experienced one after the other by the observer."

Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912oil on canvas, 3’8” x 5’4,” Guggenheim museum, NYC

(left) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Girl With Japanese Parasol, oil, 1909Die Brücke group, Expressionism

(right) Henri Matisse, Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra 1907, French Fauve Expressionism

(left) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, The Street, 1907, oil on canvas(right) Kirchner, Market Place with Red Tower, 1915, oil on canvas

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dancing Woman, 1911, wood polychromed(center) André Derain (French Fauve painter and sculptor, 1880-1954) Crouching Man, 1907, stone, 13 x 11”(right) Paul Gauguin, Idol, 1892, wood polychromedExpressionist Primitivism – French and German

(left) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait as a Soldier, 1915(right) Kirchner, The Soldier Bath (Artillerymen), 1915, oil on canvas,

55 x 59 inches

(left) Max Beckmann (German 1884 – 1950), Self Portrait with Raised Hand, 1907

(center) Beckmann, Self Portrait as Medical Orderly, 1915(right) Beckmann, Self Portrait with Red Scarf, 1917

19071915

1917

Max Beckmann, The Night, 1918-19, oil on canvas

Max Beckmann, Departure, 1932-33, oil on canvas, triptych center panel 7' 3/4" x 45 3/8“, MoMA NYC

Beckmann called the center panel "The Homecoming“: "The Queen carries the greatest treasure – Freedom - as her child in her lap. Freedom is the onething that matters—it is the departure, the new start."

Hitler and Goebbels at the Degenerate Art Exhibition, 1939, Munich

“Good German Art” admired and supported by the National Socialist (Nazi) Party

Nazi artists, (left) Ivo Saliger, Judgment of Paris, oil on canvas, (right) Arno Becker, Predestination, 1938 (right)

Adolph Hitler (German 1889 – 1945), Landscape, 1925