Modernism: German Expressionism - During the Nazis

German Expressionism consisted of a number of related creative movements in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments in Germany were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European culture.

The arrival of Expressionism announced new standards in the creation and judgment of art. Art was then meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition.

Expressionist artists often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. These techniques were meant to convey the turgid emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world, especially the German artists witnessing the First World War.

Let's look into these talented German artists and their paintings during the Nazi Period to know more.

Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. After enduring a "great injury to his soul" during World War I, Max Beckmann channeled his experience of modern life into expressive images that haunt the viewer with their intensity of emotion and symbolism.

Adam and Eve

One of the first paintings completed after his military service during World War I, Adam and Eve bears little resemblance to his prewar landscapes or large-scale narratives. The muddy tones similarly demonstrate Beckmann's shift towards moralizing images, in which every element, even the color of the paint, bears deeper meaning. The bright pop of the yellow lily and the serpent's red eye contrast sharply with the drab palette Beckmann used to portray the flat landscape and gaunt figures. These archetypes convey Beckmann's appreciation for symbolism and allegory. He uses the lily to allude to purity and redemption, while the fiery red of the serpent's eye emphasizes the mercurial nature of the devil.

Aside from the tonally symbolic schema of the painting, the jagged outlines, flat planes of color, and shallow space are the result of Beckmann's synthesis of a variety of sources. The appropriation of medieval styles and subject matter illustrates the Neue Sachlichkeit's drive to reinvigorate German tradition within the context of modernity.

Departure

This work was painted just before the Nazis came to power, and was completed shortly after they deposed him from his teaching post in Frankfurt. Despite asserting in lectures that he was apolitical, this work reflects Beckmann's growing anxiety in face of the cruelty fostered by the rise of the Nazis.

The dimly lit right panel of the triptych portrays a woman bound to an upside-down man, searching in vain for a path out of her current plight, thwarted by a drummer in front of her and a sinister bellhop at her rear. In the left panel, Beckmann represented several figures in a torture chamber with their hands bound, forced to submit to unspeakable acts of violence. The outer panels convey Beckmann's vision of the contemporary violence and brutality inflicted by people on their fellow human beings. In contrast to the dark vision of humanity in the flanking images, the central panel portrays the possibility of salvation for all. Four adult figures and one child occupy a rough wooden boat floating in an azure sea. A crowned figure with his back turned, the fisher king, grasps a net of fish and confers a blessing on the scene, while an ominous hooded man at the oars holds a fish - both allude to "the mystery of the world." Beckmann distilled the contemporary cultural climate of Europe into a transcendent message of hope and freedom, regardless of the era's tribulations.

Otto Dix

Otto Dix was perhaps the most influential German painter in shaping the popular image of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. After many artists had abandoned portraiture for abstraction in the 1910s, Dix returned to the genre and injected sharp caricatures into his depictions of some of the leading lights of German society. His other narrative subjects are remembered for their indictment of corrupt and immoral life in the modern city.

Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Fritz Glaser

This picture of the lawyer Dr. Fritz Glaser is typical of Otto Dix's portraiture from the early 1920s, in which he depicted his friends from the professional classes: doctors, lawyers and other notables who were also interested in the arts. Dix shows the lawyer in front of the snow-covered facade of a typically ornate Dresden building, which appears to have been shattered during the war. Typical of his inclination toward caricature, the artist emphasizes the prominent features in Glaser's face, in this case his Semitic nose. The picture is also typical of the contradictions in Dix's life and work - contradictions between the good relations he had with many of Dresden's bourgeoisie, and the icy, critical tone with which his art remembered them.

The War

Otto Dix was extremely affected by his war experiences and often used them as art inspiration. The War shows men going into battle, it shows the aftermath of conflict, and it shows them returning from the field. Dix studied the Old Masters in both their subject matter and painting methods. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Bible influenced him, thus associations of sacrifice and apocalypse with war imagery are common in his works.

Ernst Kirchner

Ernst Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brucke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He was one of the most famous German artists of the 20th century. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933. Depressed and ill for a long time, he eventually committed suicide.

Marzella

Around the time this picture was painted Kirchner was spending time around the Moritzberg lakes, and the girl depicted is the daughter of a circus artiste's widow that he met there. Emblematic of his Die Brucke phase, Marzella is a provocative depiction of a young, pre-pubescent girl. The youth of the figure coupled with the intense gaze and heavily made-up face give the appearance of uncanny maturity. Unnatural colors and self-conscious body language add to the unease in the composition.

The style of this portrait is typical of Kirchner - from the bold, contrasting colour scheme to the dark lines which define form. The face is also constructed from blocks of colour, rather than attempting to blend everything together. The girl features an interesting combination of innocence and youthfulness, but also alluring eyes and bright lips. Her pose is of vulnerability, she leans over with her arms crossed and her legs together. She sits on a small striped carpet or towel and the colours to fill the room behind her are bright and warm, with again very minimal detail. The work is clearly Expressionist, where artists concentrate on feeling and emotion rather than directly reproducing reality.

The painting is an example of a technique of rapid sketching used by members of Die Brucke, who believed this process allowed them to capture the "soul" of the subject.

Portrait as a Soldier

This painting examines the psychological distress experienced by Kirchner during his service in the military. He was a reluctant soldier and soon became preoccupied with avoiding service, and following a self-induced psychosis, aided by his use of alcohol and drugs, he was discharged. The painting displays a uniformed Kirchner standing in his studio, smoking a cigarette. His right hand is severed, symbolizing his trauma and possibly also his anxiety of his loss of manhood; the motif is based on Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear (1889), a picture the artist painted after he too had inflicted injuries upon himself. In the background of Kirchner's picture stands a nude who bears a resemblance to his lover of the time, Erna Schilling.

The meaning of his injury in this painting is to signify how the war would damage his creativity, as if literally losing a hand. The mental and physical turmoil caused by going to war is impossible to imagine unless you have been through it yourself, and with Expressionist artists being so in tune with their emotions, the impact for them would be even more significant.

Emil Nolde

Like the movement with which he was associated, Die Brucke, Emil Nolde's art creates a bridge from Germany's distant visual past to its more radical future. Nolde reintroduced religious subject matter, which had been a typical mainstay of northern art for hundreds of years. His interpretation retained the German predilection for expressive images but they were not rendered in a realistic style. Although based on biblical incidents from both the Old and New Testaments, his compositions abstracted and exaggerated forms to delineate figures in a compressed space, bypassing the use of traditional linear perspective to relate the story.

The Last Supper

Religious subject matter appeared in Emil Nolde's works shortly after recovering from a bout with food poisoning that nearly killed him. These works are widely considered to be his most powerful. The gaunt appearance of Christ in the piece has led some to speculate that Emil Nolde identified with Him, having just recovered from a near death experience. The choice of subject matter may be attributed to Nolde's early travels that included a trip to Milan where he viewed Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. Its influence remained with him for years afterward. However, this painting is starkly different from traditional representations of the religious scene. There is no depth or spatial context to the space, no sprawling table, just 13 men mostly surrounding the central figure. The light source seems to come from Christ himself at the center of the canvas. Painted in bright yellows, reds, oranges, and white, Christ is almost crowded by darker figures, looking on as he holds a chalice in his hands. The colors, composition, and loose brushstrokes, all hallmarks of the style of Die Brucke, work together to express how Emil Nolde imagined that moment to be.

Dance Around the Golden Calf

Dance Around the Golden Calf reflects Nolde's strong religious background and echoes Fauvism in its bold use of color and subject matter. The story that inspired the image is taken from the book of Exodus in the Old Testament. It was feared that Moses, who had left the Israelites for forty days to journey up Mt. Sinai, where he received the Ten Commandments, might not return. The golden calf was crafted in his absence to fulfill the spiritual needs of these unsophisticated people. The exuberant figures in the foreground may be seen as symbols of the paganism and decadence that the commandments would rectify. In his use of bright colors, slashing brush strokes and uninhibited, rhythmic movement, Emil Nolde uses the vocabulary of Expressionism to condemn the dancers without being explicitly didactic.

Oscar Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka moved daringly from a more decorative style into a bold, racy Expressionism. His disorienting compositions used bold brushstrokes and strong colors to confront the viewer.

Self-portrait as Warrior

Self-portrait as Warrior declares his break with Jugendstil and decorative arts and affirms his commitment to an expressionistic art. The artist subverts the traditional form of the portrait bust by presenting distorted, suffering features. It is as if Kokoschka pulled back his own skin to reveal raw nerves and flesh. The thickly modeled clay, with incised lines, would find its counterpart in his portrait paintings from this same time. Kokoschka remarked of the striations in the clay, "Seeing a Polynesian mask with its incised tattooing, I understood at once, because I could feel my own facial nerves reacting to cold and hunger in the same way."

Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat

In this work, Kokoschka depicts prominent Viennese art historians Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat, who were supporters of contemporary art, not so much as they actually looked but how he understood their psyches. The figures do not face each other, and Erica's posture with her arms across her chest further divides her from her husband. The two stare off into different distances, not even looking at the viewer. This trance-like state separates each from the other and from the viewer. Their exaggerated and distorted hands are about to touch or have just touched, creating an electrified tension. The hands, with their long, sinewy fingers and odd colors also convey a sense of nervousness, or uncertainty.

Oscar Kokoschka often set his sitters in an indeterminate space. Here he fills the background with thin layers of swirling browns, yellows, oranges, and greens and, using the end of his paintbrush, scratched lines emanating from the figures. By refusing to place the couple in a physical setting, Kokoschka signals his interest lies in their psychological states and the energy they discharge.

Wassily Kandinsky

One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist's inner experience.

Der Blaue Berg (The Blue Mountain)

In this work, the influence of the Fauves on Kandinsky's color palette is apparent as he distorted colors and moved away from the natural world. He presented a bright blue mountain, framed by a red and yellow tree on either side. In the foreground, riders on horseback charge through the scene. At this stage in Kandinsky's career, Saint John's Book of Revelation became a major literary source for his art, and the riders signify the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The horsemen, although an indicator of the mass destruction of the apocalypse, also represent the potential for redemption afterward.

Kandinsky's vibrant palette and expressive brushwork provide the viewer with a sense of hope rather than despair.

Composition VII

Commonly cited as the pinnacle of Kandinsky's pre-World War I achievement, Composition VII shows the artist's rejection of pictorial representation through colors and shapes. The operatic and tumultuous roiling of forms around the canvas exemplifies Kandinsky's belief that painting could evoke sounds the way music called to mind certain colors and forms. Even the title, Composition VII, aligned with his interest in the intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized Kandinsky's non-representational focus in this work. As the different colors and symbols spiral around each other, Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and laid bare the different abstracted glyphs in order to communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all cultures and viewers.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born painter, printmaker and draughtsman of German nationality, originally associated with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, and subsequently taught at the Bauhaus, the widely influential German art school of the interwar period.

Highway and Byways (Hauptweg und Nebenwege)

Paul Klee visited Egypt in 1928, inspired by the North African country to create brightly colored abstract works. Yet, like many of his others, this painting is not quite fully divorced from its real world subject. Narrow blue rectangles at the top of the canvas suggest the sky, while uneven rectangles and trapezoids create paths leading one's eye from the bottom of the page to the elevated horizon. Broad trapezoids painted pale hues are arranged down the center of the canvas to suggest a main road. Thus Klee manipulates color, shape, and line to create a sense of real-world depth and movement.

Death and Fire

The German word for death, Tod, makes up the features of the white face in the center of the picture, so powerfully, yet simply reminiscent of a human or an animal skull. "Tod" may be found again in the "T" shape of the figure's raised arm, the golden orb in its hand, and the D shape of its face. Perhaps a minimally described man walks toward Death, or perhaps towards the glowing sun held in Death's hand. The image juxtaposes the cold white with the warm reds and yellows, perhaps symbolic, like a kind of cave painting, of the creation of man and the image of his sad mortality. Inspired by Klee's interest in hieroglyphics, Death and Fire suggests that abstraction and representation have been mutually accommodating, or otherwise complementary means of expression, since time immemorial.

George Grosz

George Grosz is one of the principal artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, along with Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, and was a member of the Berlin Dada group.

The Faith Healers

This work depicts a doctor inspecting a skeleton with an ear trumpet, pronouncing him "KV" (short for kriegsverwendungsfahig, or "fit for combat"). Unconcerned with the diagnosis, the surrounding officers appear either bored or absorbed in other matters. The scene refers to the desperate recall of discharged soldiers toward the end of war, after the German forces suffered heavy losses. Grosz himself had been forced to return to the front in 1917, only to be released four months later for mental illness, lending the subject a great deal of personal significance. Grosz's penchant for grotesquerie is indebted to the precedent set by the German Gothic tradition, which he often looked to as a source of inspiration. Grosz is best known for his drawings and works on paper, and The Faith Healers is an exemplary work of his highly politically charged style that overlaps with the ideals of both Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the Berlin Dada group.

Peace, II

Painted the year after World War II ended, Peace, II, conveys Grosz's grim vision of the war's aftermath. Having witnessed the horrors of World War I in person, as well as its fallout while still in Germany, Grosz clearly held the pessimistic opinion that true peace could not be achieved in the modern world. Regarding the Treaty of Versailles and the resolution of WWI, he stated, "Peace was declared, but not all of us were drunk with joy or stricken blind." This is one in a group of paintings that he executed during the war that shares similar apocalyptic imagery, swirling compositions, and haunting allegorical figures. Grosz presents the viewer with a central skeletal figure striding out of what remains of a bombed-out building, with detritus piled high on every side. The lone figure emerging from the depiction of a modern hell-mouth comments on the outcome of war as well as the possibility of peace in the future. This painting is far more expressionistic than any of his earlier work.

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We all know World War I was the bloodiest and costliest war of all time. However, not only did it affect the economy worldwide but it also had a strong impact on art, including the German artists living under the Nazi. Those dark days were depicted lively on their works, showing their thoughts and despair of the long-lasting war, as well as their hope for a brighter future.