Art of the 20th Century. Dorothea Eimert

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Curious, the young generation seeks to see and experience everything that is new. In many cities, people gathered in Secessionist societies. Thus, the exchange of information among artists increased, as well as their acceptance in society. In the open-minded Rhineland, there was contact with the most important centres of art. The connections to France and Paris were closer there than elsewhere. That lent the art of this region an especially French feeling. Expressionism was more moderate here. The jagged splintering of shapes or the ecstasy of colour appeared only seldom among the Rhinelanders and only in moderated form. The Rhenish painters were more likely to be oriented towards Fauvism and Cubism, but, above all else, towards the Orphism of Robert Delaunay. The young August Macke from Bonn was a driving force and a towering personality. He was in close contact with the Blaue Reiter and took part in organising the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon in 1913 in Berlin. Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism and the Blaue Reiter all gave the artists living in the Rhineland impressions that, taken all together, developed into Rhenish Expressionism with its special lyrical tinge.

      The crucial cultural event occurred in the summer of 1912 in Cologne, where the International Exhibition of the Sonderbund West German Friends of Art and Artists at Cologne had a total of 634 paintings, sculptures and hand drawings on display. For the first time ever at this world exhibition, all the leading and driving forces of modernist art from Impressionism to Picasso were brought together. The most important artists from our view today, the trailblazers of modernist art such as Van Gogh, Munch, Cézanne and Gauguin were given dedicated exhibition halls. The effect was international, definitive, sweeping, and an impetus for the famous Amory Show, which was held in the early part of 1913 in New York. At this event, more than 1500 exhibits were shown, a third of them being European.

      The effect of the famous Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 in Cologne (which for many of the artists was a revelation) was also felt immediately among the young Rhinelanders. A touring exhibit of Italian Futurists during October of 1912 in Cologne reinforced this. This exhibit had previously been seen with Herwarth Walden in Berlin and was now being taken by August Macke to the Rhineland. From the knowledge gained from the exhibited avant-garde, the art of the young Rhineland painters developed further. After the World War I, they came together in the Junges Rheinland (Young Rhineland).

      For the first time in July 1913, the artistic avant-garde of the West put on a combined exhibit in the art salon of the Cohen Bookstore. Wilhelm Worringer, who taught at the University of Cologne, had an academically open-minded view of Expressionism and Modernist art. August Macke, along with sixteen other young artists, took part in one of the first joint exhibitions titled Rhenish Expressionists. These included Ernst Moritz Engert, Franz M. Jansen, Joseph Kölschbach, August Macke’s cousin Helmuth Macke, Carlo Mense, Heinrich Nauen, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Hans Thuar, Heinrich Campendonk, Franz Henseler and Max Ernst, who in his early paintings was, without doubt, an Expressionist before he became famous as Dada Max and the founder of Surrealism. However, the exhibition was not able to contribute to the long-term cooperation between the participating artists, as the next year World War I destroyed all international relations, and August Macke died in France in the first days of the war.

      For the first time at this exhibition of the Rhenish Expressionists, trends that had been observed earlier in Berlin and Munich were also seen in the Rhineland. This was because a generation of artists was emerging with ideas from the European renewal, namely, Early Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, melding these into a unified and overarching way of painting that they wanted to develop further from the old into a new continuing unity. The rather carefully worded statement concerning this Rhenish art was formulated by the Cologne art critic, painter and writer, Rudi Mense: The common goal of these artists was ‘to capture the secretive and rather mysterious language of things and to hold the inner light of the world, its melodious meaning and its ringing existence and to approximate this in a painting.’ Max Ernst reported later: ‘We were joined by a thirst for life, poetry, freedom, the pursuit of the absolute, for knowledge.’

      Heinrich Campendonk, In the Forest, c. 1919.

      Oil on canvas, 83.8 × 99 cm. Gift of Robert H. Tannahill, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

      August Macke belonged to the German painters who, shortly after 1910, struggled not only theoretically, but also from the artistic point of view, with the artistic trends of their day. Macke recognised that ‘All these things, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and abstract painting are just terms for the change that we want our artistic thinking to make and is making.’ This he intuitively understood and was the basis for his further development. They were Impressionism, specifically George Seurat and the linear rhythm; the colour panes of Robert Delaunay and movement through colour; as well as Futurism, of which he thought: ‘Contemporary painting can avoid this idea even less than Picasso.’

      In the autumn of 1912, Macke, together with Franz Marc, visited Robert Delaunay in Paris, who then in January together with Apollinaire came to Bonn for a return visit. In March 1913, Delaunay exhibited a larger number of his works in Cologne. Macke was impressed most of all by Fenètres.

      Already in Paris, I had the feeling that I had before me some very significant things. …My heart opens up when I see the houses and the Eiffel Tower through these windows with sunlight shinning through them… I almost always think about this. The reflecting windowpanes through which on a sunny day one can see the city and the Eiffel Tower.

      Simultaneity was the magic word of the movement then. Man and his surroundings were the main subjects for Macke’s paintings. In particular, it is the youthful elegance of women, who in the world of his paintings are composed of rhythm, movement, and reflections. He used variations of the doubling principle associated with the Futurists Balla and Russolo in his scenes. He also used Boccioni’s technique for visualising the invisible and Ardengo Soffici’s method of depicting acoustic components with dots.

      Heinrich Campendonk was a friend of August Macke and Franz Marc. His landscape depictions during his most creative period culminate in spatial and temporal simultaneity of varying impressions and sequences into a characterisation of landscape and action. Animals and vegetation, buildings and objects stand in close relationship to one another СКАЧАТЬ