Expressionism. Ashley Bassie

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      Late in 1909, Kirchner and Heckel began using two young girls, Fränzi and Marzella, aged somewhere between ten and fifteen, as models for numerous paintings and graphic works (pp.39–41). They came from the local working-class district of Friedrichstadt. In the Brücke works, they sometimes appear in outdoor settings – they accompanied the artists to the lakes in 1910 – but usually they are in the studio, often nude and shown with dolls, animals or “primitive” carvings. Adolescent subjects had provided powerful and controversial material in Germany already. Frank Wedekind’s play, Frühlingserwachen (Spring’s Awakening), written in 1890–91, focused on the tragic fate of three adolescents for whom the onset of puberty awakens feelings and emotions that throw them into direct conflict with the strictures of bourgeois morality. Breaking several taboos at once (homosexuality, suicide and abortion among them), it was banned in Germany for several years. But by the time the Brücke were working, it had been successfully staged many times and was enjoying great popularity. 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 СКАЧАТЬ