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Expressionism is one of the most misunderstood and shapeless movements in Modern Art. The word became so loaded that many early Expressionist artists like Emil Nolde and Max Beckman - and later Francis Bacon and Julian Schnabel tried to avoid its implications and limitations. In fact no group ever called itself Expressionist – or wrote a manifesto of Expressionism.            It has often been seen as an aberration of modernism – a regional form of reactionary art. Clement Greenburg wrote; "Picasso's good luck was to have come to French modernism directly, without the intervention of any other kind of modernism. It was perhaps Kandinsky's bad luck to have to go through German modernism first." (Bassie, Ashley Expressionism. Kent: Grange Books, P. 47, 2005.) This was no casual remark – Greenburg loathed Expressionism even when he could not avoid it in the work of artists he admired like Pollock. Was this in part because of his Jewish heritage and the horrific crimes of the Nazis? If so he was not alone in this angry chauvinism.  In fact the Expressionists were magnets for condemnation from all quarters – left and right, German, French, American, English, Academics, Dadaists, and Abstractionists. Personally it only made me love their work even more. To piss-off so many different kinds of artists, critics, thinkers and publics – they had to be doing something right. 

             Even the origin of the word's use in art parlance is still hotly debated. Of course all art is expressive in one way or another. Every artist aims to communicate to a public - and in the modern Western world – the general public have typically prized works of emotional power and vulnerability in their art and music. However the art world has typically swung from an emotional approach - to art and an intellectual one. For every Michelangelo there has been a Raphael, for every Caravaggio a Poussin, for every Rembrant a Vermeer, for every Goya a David, for every Picasso a Duchamp, for every Pollock a Warhol, for every Bacon a Hockney, for every Schnabel a Salle, for every Meese a Tuymans.  Initially in the early 1900's Expressionism was a catch-all word used to describe art that was the opposite of naturalistic Impressionism. An art that emphasized the artist's emotions and highly subjective interpretation of reality - not his eye-sight and perceptions of light.      Various writers in the nineteenth century had begun to use the term Expressionism in their journals. As the author Lionel Richard in The Concise Encyclopedia of Expressionism (1984) and Marit Werenskiold in The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses (1984) detailed - the origin of the word Expressionism is a tangled web complicated by nationalism and professional rivalry.   Researchers like Armin Arnold dug up a mention of a modern school of expressionist painters in an article on the poet William Wordsworth in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in July 1850 by an anonymous writer. The article described: "the expressionist school of modern painters [who] rebuke the richness of the colourists by the conventional ideality of their Byzantine Madonnas."        Arnold also found out that in 1880, in Manchester, Charles Howley devoted a lecture to modern painters in which he identified some as expressionists seeking to express their feelings and emotions. No mention of specific artists were made - however given the date 1850, it is likely that he was speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite's – who were very far from what we would consider today as Expressionists.  Arnold also dug up a novel by Charles de Kay from the US called The Bohemian from 1878 – in which a group of writers who called themselves expressionists appeared. However none of this usage defined Expressionism in sufficiently exact stylistic terms. Other historians of Expressionism like Fritz Schmalenbach rightly dismissed these discoveries as obscure and essentially meaningless.  Other historians like the Swede Teddy Brunius have found other obscure quotes. In 1891 in James McNeill Whistler's book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies there was this quote from an unknown source: "Mr Whistler is eminently an 'Impressionist'… We want not 'impressionists' but expressionists', men who can say what they mean because they know what they have heard [Sic!]" However this was just a play-on-words not a real critical use of the word.           In 1901 in Paris at the Salon des Independants, the minor and forgotten painter Jules-August-Herve exhibited eight canvases under the title Expressionismes. He was clearly making a nod towards Impressionism and at the same time opposing it. However he made no impact on French art history other than perhaps preventing any serious French painters to use the term again. Also his use of the plural suggested that he was merely describing a set of pictures and was not announcing a new movement. The term made no mark on the French art world and only entered French critical writing in 1920 when it was used to describe German expressionists.        In Germany, in May 1910 Aby Warburg writing about late Middle Ages graphic art - in the Journal Kunst und Kunstler - used the term "expressionistisch' in contrast to "impressionistch". In retrospect some said that in 1910 in Germany, when Paul Cassirer was asked if a painting by Pechstein was still an Impressionist canvas - he replied that it was an example of expressionism. This quip they say became widely used in artistic circles and later the newspapers.      Then in 1911 within the space of four months the term Expressionism emerged in the writings of a number of writers first in England, then Norway, then Sweden and finally Berlin. It started with Arthur Clutton-Brock in England in January 1911. In The Burlington Magazine he wrote: "Their only end is expression… And to distinguish them [the Post-Impressionists] from the Impressionists we might, perhaps, call them Expressionists, which is an ugly word, but less ugly than Post-Impressionists." His argument was carried on by Henrik Sorensen in Norway in February and by Carl David Moselius in Sweden in March 1911.  All of these writers used the term as a replacement for the unsatisfactory Post-Impressionist term (which no longer described much of the art in the first years of the twentieth century) – which had been coined by Roger Fry for his infamous exhibition - "Manet and The Post-Impressionists" in the Grafton Galleries in London from November 1910 to January 1911. According to Werenskiold, Roger Fry between 1910-11 had toyed with the use of expressionism as a term to describe those artists in France between 1880-1910, like Van Gogh, Gauguin and later Matisse who had developed increasingly personal imagery, subjective emotions and idiosyncratic use of colour and brushwork in their paintings. However Fry finally opted to call these artists 'Post-Impressionists'. Marit Werenskiold's theory was that Roger Fry who was a friend and mentor of Cutton-Brock and his editor on The Burlington Magazine - had prompted or encouraged Arthur Clutton-Brock to make this new distinction. She also thought that he had been influenced by the writings of Matisse in this and she might have been right, but she was not alone in this. She also later suggested that Fry might have been the real author of the original article.    From April to September 1911, at the Berlin Sezession, one room of invited French painters including; Braque, Derain, Van Dongen, Dufy, Friesz, Manguin, Marquet, Picasso and Vladamick - were all introduced in the catalogue as Expressionists. Yet the person responsible for the catalogue remains unknown. Writing about the show in Der Sturm, Walter Hegmann wrote: "a group of Franco-Belgian painters have decided to call themselves expressionists." It was from this point that the term became widely used in German newspapers and it becamr a recognized term.       In 1919, Henry Kahnweiler (the German dealer who promoted Picasso and the Cubists in France and Europe) in the journal Das Kunstblatt, attacked the idea spreading in Germany that Expressionism was of French origin. This was at a time - when many in Germany were attacking modernism - as a corrupting French hoax on the art-world. Kahnweiler denied that the term had any usage in France. His critique was aimed at Theodor Daubler who nearly went as far as claiming that Matisse was the originator of Expressionism and that the French critic Louis Vauxelles had originated the term.     This last claim as I have mentioned has merit. Matisse's bold, ambitious and unnaturalistic use of colour as early as 1905 predated the less daring early work of the Brucke painters who were still trying to digest the lessons of Van Gogh. In 1908 Matisse's first important show of paintings were shown in Berlin. The following year Kunst und Kunstler published his now legendary 'Painters Notes' (first published in December 1908 in Grande Revue) in which he famously wrote: "what I am looking for above all is a means of expression". However while there were superficial similarities between the aims of the Fauves like Matisse and Van Dongen and the German Expressionists like Kirchner and Nolde – there was also major differences of taste, feeling and purpose.         What this convoluted and tangled tale tells me – is that there was never any inventor of the term Expressionism in any meaningful sense. The closest was probably Matisse even though his work was very different from late German Expressionism. In fact as an authentic Expressionist, I have to say I find such academic epistemology sickening, absurd and meaningless. Expressionism was a word bandied about by many people at the turn of the twentieth century – often as a term of abuse – or used so superficially as to be nothing but slang. That it became within a few decades synonymous with modern art in the mind of the German public - only confirms to me that it was a catch-all word - emanating from a broad Zeitgeist. What is not in doubt is that it was in Germany that this word took hold, became a rallying-cry for young artists and a politicized subject for sceptics, academics, xenophobes and later the Fascists.    Today in art writing it is usually used to describe the art of the German Expressionists and particularly the two groups of artists that formed Die Brucke in Dresden and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. That is because they were the exception to the rule - that unlike other Modern movements like; Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism or Futurism – Expressionism was never a unified movement. It was largely a dispersed group of loners living in isolation on the edge of society – like Munch in Oslo, Ensor in Ostend, Schiele in Vienna or Rouault in Paris. Moreover it was German artists, writers, bohemians, art galleries, collectors and museums in the 1910's that first embraced these outsiders when others in Europe dismissed them as barbarians. Expressionism – particularly in Germany was not just restricted to painting, drawing, sculpture and wood-cut printing – it also influenced poetry, prose, theatre, film, music and even architecture.            The Expressionist generation of 1905-23 - were in direct conflict with Prussian patriarchy and their fathers in particular - this battle of wills was made most explicit in Expressionist drama and prose. This young generation of men - were sick of the hypocrisy of German society and at the same time despaired that real social change could be achieved. Suicides amongst young men reached epidemic proportions. "The petty-bourgeois conspiracy to hush up matters sexual, especially when they concerned the young, can be seen by the fact that Spring's Awakening, though published in 1891, went unperformed until 1906. Nevertheless, the issue of schoolboy suicides had already become a national scandal. Indeed, "in the last twenty-years of the nineteenth century no fewer than 1, 152 adolescents thus took their own lives."(Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press, P.27, 1987).

              The Expressionist revolution in Germany was looked on with suspicion by the rest of Europe. Remember anti-German feeling in France, Britain and America from 1914-1945 was at fever pitch. Everything German was looked upon with suspicion, fear and anger – even when its artists had often been persecuted in their own country and were politically blameless.     Even in Germany the romance with Expressionism only lasted until the end of World War One. In its aftermath – new artists like those of the Dada movement attacked it as bourgeois, decadent and politically suspect. It was finally finished-off by the Nazis - when they took power in 1933. After the Second World War and Denazification - it was restored to pride of place in German museums – however as a creative movement it had lost all its edge.         It was only in the late 1960's - that the work of the German and Austrian Expressionists were rediscovered in Europe - by a young generation unbiased by experience of World War Two. For these youthful students who were also fighting patriarchal, capitalistic and militaristic power - these young German's spoke to them. Its massive resurgence as a commercially viable and critically respected movement in the late 1960's in Europe, Britain and America created a professorial gold rush – where all kinds of artists were roped into its pantheon, all kinds of critics tried to lay claim to its origin and all kinds of nations tried to claim its homeland. Thus Expressionism has always been the lump of faeces that turns into gold, back into faeces and then back into gold. It has constantly been derided by the academics when unfashionable - and parodied and copied by them when at its peak of consumption. The truly great Expressionists alone in their studios were the lie to the academic rule - that states one has to be trained, educated and socialized into making great art.         

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As I have mentioned the public and critics in Paris, London and New York have always been suspicious of Expressionism. Even in 2008 - Expressionism is a byword for madness, intellectual crudeness and art-world trouble-making. Exhibitions of Expressionist greats like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Max Beckman have never achieved the viewing figures or public fondness of artists like Monet, Matisse or Picasso. Artists like Van Gogh, Munch and Bacon were very rare examples of Expressionists - whose life and work was eventually lauded by the critics, prized by collectors, empathetically studied by the general public and parodied in the media.                   The autonomy and indifference of the Expressionist artist - simultaneously alienated the snobs of the art world and enraged the general public who thought them con men. Yet within two generations the very best of these artists – became heroes to those who dreamed of a similarly independent life – free from the restraints, compromises and drudgery of middle-class life.   

             Expressionist artists deliberately worked against the grain of social order. They prized their individuality and feelings above the learned-by-rote techniques and intellectualizations of academic art. In Expressionist art, the voice of the individual was raised against civilizing academic convention, social compromise and press-speak. Expressionist painters sought to make their own psychological understanding of the world the central axis of their art. Rendering commonplace things in an unfamiliar manner, Expressionist painters highlighted the fissure between the personal and the social.   North and Central Europe was the home of the first Expressionists. Early Expressionism of the 1900's - was the culmination of an attitude to making art that had started in the Renaissance when for the first time the reputation and personality of the artist was considered vital to its meaning, content and value. No artist signified this shift in artistic thinking more than the German master Albrecht Durer – whose narcissism and melancholy imbued his stupendously skilled work - with a metaphysical world-weariness that was groundbreaking. Indeed the German and Flemish painters of the Northern Renaissance like Hans Baldung Grien, Durer, Altdorfer, Grunewald, Bosch and Bruegel – where to become rediscovered by the German Expressionists – who were trying to trace the roots of their temperament. However even the Latin cultures of Italy and Spain could lay claim to proto-Expressionists – like the late religiously tortured Michelangelo with his obsessive piles of dammed human bodies, the Venetian painter Tintoretto with his Baroque and animated canvases and El Greco with his spatially packed and energized compositions. Personally I date the real start of modern Expressionism to Goya's Black Paintings of 1821-3 (housed now in the Prado museum in Madrid). To me they are the first major paintings to express a modern conception of man's Godless existence in a cruel and unjust universe.              The three great upsurges in Expressionist art in the twentieth century – 1905, 1940 and 1980 – came in periods of great social, political and economic uncertainty and a broad fear of cultural decline.

      There were many kinds of early Expressionism. First there was a pan-European, pre-Expressionism – a non-movement of isolated and highly-individualistic Expressionists like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, Ensor, and Rouault whose work tended towards the emotional, primitive, spiritual, irrational and subjective.           Next in Germany there was pre-war figurative Expressionism centred around the Die Brucke group – whose early work was optimistic, idealistic and often joyous.      They were followed by a semi-abstract form of painting centred evolved by the painters of Der Blaue Reiter and personified in the work of Kandinsky and Klee - which was born from an Expressionist ethos that believed in the subjective, emotional, spiritual and idealistic power of art to change the world.  Later in Germany there was a post-war figurative Expressionism - which was cynical, despairing and increasingly neurotic.           At the same time in Austria there emerged another kind of figurative Expressionism - which was more animated, sexually fixated and anguished. This Austrian Expressionism consisted of a handful of highly individualistic artists like Gerstl, Kokoschka and Schiele.      Meanwhile in France there were Fauve artists' like Matisse and Van Dongen who exhibited in Germany on numerous occasions before the First World War - and Jewish Expressionist artists' like Mark Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin who lived and worked in Paris between the wars.              In South America there was also an expressive art that mixed Western and Aztec influences with Socialist politics to create the only credible socialist art of the twenthieth century.   Added to these was the third great wave of Expressionism of the 1940's - which ranged from the abstract drips of Pollock to the aggressive abstract/figurative Expressionism of De Kooning in America and the earthy brutish figuration of Dubuffet and the coiled nudes of Fautiner in Paris.   Finally in the late 1970's there was the emergence of a new post-modern, academic, mannered and commercialized form of Neo-Expressionism epitomized by the work of George Baselitz and Julian Schnabel whose work was heavily embedded within the new art gallery system. Thus trying to pin down Expressionism is like trying to herd fifty cats in a canvas bag.

      Expressionism was the total opposite of 'art-for-arts-sake'. For the Expressionist - art was a compulsion, an obsession and literally a reason for living. Most of the great Expressionist artists were largely self-taught and unteachable, mentally unstable, anti-social, spiritually tortured, and lived through many years of rejection, poverty and public hostility. They were doomed to incomprehension, pity, condescendion and fear. While those precious few that made a mark on art history were burdened with a mythology, hyperbole and fetishization - that made even them deeply uncomfortable. Madman or genius, worthless or priceless, fool or prophet - these were the only career options for the Expressionist. In keeping with their art - there were no grey areas.            The clichéd myth of the great Expressionist artist demanded that he must suffer for his art. In the art world as in the real world – nothing sold better in the early days of Modernism than a sob story. Thus their life-stories were deemed vital to their credibility. Integrity was vital for the Expressionist artist – frequently it was all they had.  No other movement not even Surrealism was so closely linked with madness. Yet while the Surrealists played and flirted with insanity – many of the greatest Expressionists were stark raving mad. Many of their biographies were a litany of; childhood bereavement, neurosis, years of rejection, alcoholism, drug abuse, syphilis, poverty, isolation, public ridicule, depression, mental hospitals, attempted suicides and realized suicides. The tragedy of some of the Expressionist artists was that their burning desire to speak openly to everyone – resulted in nothing but rejection, marginalization and even deeper incomprehension. Even if success did come it usually resulted in a complete loss of the scared fire of their youth and accusations of selling out. It also inflicted a fatal form of self-censorship – brought on by over-exposure.             From the earliest days of Post-Impressionsim, Symbolism and later Expressionism - modern artists - were connected by many European writers with insanity - in both positive and negative terms. It began in 1863 with Cesare Lombroso's 'Genius and Insanity', and his example was taken up by other studies in pathology by; Charcot, Krafft-Ebing, Magnan and continued in more nasty and frantic terms with Max Nordau's Degeneration in 1895.           The Jewish medical doctor Nordau railed against the decadence and vulgarity of high art and mass-produced pornography. He took aim at many of the modern artistic movements of his time including the Pre-Raphaelites, Realists and Symbolists as well as writers like Zola, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Ibsen and composers like Wagner. "From a clinical point of view somewhat unlike each other, these pathological images are nevertheless only different manifestations of a single and unique fundamental condition, to wit, exhaustion, and they must be ranked by the alienist in the genius melancholia, which is the psychiatrical symptom of an exhausted central nervous system… We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides, 'What is to come next?'" (Quoted by Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press, P. 10, 1987).    This concern with the vulgarity of contemporary art and the new mass produced pornography that was sold covertly everywhere in Europe was perfectly summed up in the writings of Swiss hygienist Dr. August Forel. In his book 'Art and Pornography' in 1905, Dr Forel expressed similar concerns about the degeneracy of western civilization: "There are a few great artists, but thousands of charlatans and plagiarists. Many of those who have never had the least idea of the dignity of art pander to the lower instincts of the masses and not to their best sentiments. In this connection, erotic subjects play a sad and powerful part. Nothing is too filthy to be used to stimulate the base sensuality of the public… In these brothels of art, the most obscene vice is glorified, even the pathological." (Quoted by Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven: Yale University Press, P.11, 1987).  By 1912 artists like Paul Klee had begun to praise the art of the insane, and by the 1920's books contrasting the work of modern artists and those in mental patients emerged. Hans Prinzhorn, in his groundbreaking work 'Artistry of the Mentally Ill', (1922), observed that: "The particularly close relationship of a larger number of our [schizophrenics] pictures to contemporary art is obvious." However he countered the view that self-victimizing Expressionist artists were the same as the truly victimized mentally ill marginalized by society and incarcerated in hospitals: "The conclusion that a painter is mentally ill because he paints like a given mental patient is no more intelligent or convincing than [the idea] that Pechstein and Heckel are Africans from the Cameroons because they produce wooden figurines like those by Africans from the Cameroons."     The truly great Expressionist artists did not choose art – it possessed them like a fever. They emerged in period of political, social, sexual, and religious crisis - the like of which the world had never seen. Remember this was an age in Europe when many said that religious faith was moribund, God was dead, Monarchy was considered by many to be decadent and corrupt, democracies were still in infancy and ideological battles about politics, religion, sexuality, female emancipation and the purpose of art was debated furiously in cafes through out the West. Everyone could see that the growing arms race and diplomatic hostilities amongst the great powers - would lead to war. However no one could imagine how devastating it would be when it arrived. In such uncertain and crazy times – these artists fell back on the one thing they could trust – their own gut. They envisioned art as a new form of religion, a brotherhood, a protest against society, a soothing balm for the desperately lonely and a utopia solution to modern life.  For the early Expressionist artists – personal, urgent communication was paramount. Their restless, agitated, linear and violently coloured work - expressed their metaphysical anxiety forcefully.   

      The German Expressionist's were never great innovators in terms of form. Their work was the summation and exploitation of a series of very different movements and influences; Impressionism, Symbolism, Jugendstil, Fauvism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Gothic art, German Romanticism, African and Oceanic art, Folk art, naïve art and even Islamic and Oriental art. Which they both pumped up and debased - in order to create some of the most violent looking and aggressive art-works in human history. Perhaps only the Incas produced more blood-curdling works. However that was their intention. They wanted to provoke reaction - which they hoped would expose the metal fist under the velvet glove of Western society. Remember the wealth and power of a small European elite and the growing prosperity of the middle-classes was based on Imperalistic military might - which had colonized; Africa, Asia and South America - and held down a teaming underclass in their own cities and countryside.

      They hated the ultra-disciplined, highly-skilled - but unimaginative and conformist academic artists of their day - who sought to; beautify life, glorify the elite and flatter their patrons. They wanted to shake everything up, critique their society and defiantly set themselves above the dim-witted but cunning patrician class. They expressed abnormal sensibilities, uncontrollable emotions, primitive narratives and an increasingly doomed world-view. All of this was part of the increasing democratizing of art – and the new assertion of individual freedom in society.       They distorted and accentuated reality - in order to express their feelings for the world. They used violent, garish, jarring colours – often taken straight from the tube. Which they piled on with thick hog-hair brushes - amassing think trenches of impastoed paint, a tendency that reached its convulsive peak in the canvases of Soutine. They used explosive lines – drawn with haste and a heavy hand and sharp contrasts of light and shade. The subjects of their paintings were dramatic and animated – landscapes on fire with colour, seedy street scenes, moralistic brothel scenes, vulgar nudes, aggressive self-portraits and even deeply religious or spiritual paintings.       They sought to do more than simply record the naturalistic appearance of everyday life – they sought to express a transcendent truth – often verging on the abstract - especially in the work of Der Blaue Reiter. Despite their uncertain faith – they were often deeply spiritual men – just look at Van Gogh, Rouault, Nolde, or later expressive painters like Pollock, Rothko or Bacon.     Many of their works verged on the unintentionally comic – a result of their very basic skill sets and lack of self-criticism. Many of their drawings were no better than that of talentless teenagers. However the forcefulness of their expressive urges and their authentic (if naïve) sincerity raised the stakes in many of their works. They often saw themselves as Christ like figures – reviled, misunderstood and debased by the ignorant masses and cunning elites. They imagined their art as a transcendent expression of their self-hood - unmediated by social or aesthetic constraints and dogma. This was essentially - a revitalization of the Romantic artists' belief in the primacy of their own egos and spiritual quest. It was a mythology that was to be reborn in the art of the early American Abstract-Expressionist painters in the 1940's - even though they had little understanding of its German origins. The fundamental problem with this fetishization of the artist's 'vision' – was that it was both presumptuous and elitist in an increasingly egalitarian society. Moreover for every thousand artists at the turn of the century who believed they had some kind of privileged, 'God-given' power of expression - only one or two were equipped with the required level of skill, originality, dedication and relentless self-questioning required - to make timeless and universal art.            The city as painted by the early German Expressionists took on an at-first frightening and finally hellish quality unseen in art since Goya. Modern urban life in their eyes was electrifying, terrifying, hypocritical and debased. They both loved its freedom and hated its decadence. In Kirchner's paintings of Berlin in the early 1910's; electric lights shone on the creepy lives of men trawling the streets at night - for prostitutes who stood like coked-up, Gothic movie stars - on the lonely sidewalks. After World War One, savage satirists like Grosz and Dix - depicted a chaotic Berlin teeming with handicapped and scared soldiers begging for money, axe murders dripping in blood, vengeful Generals and gross fat bankers fondling heartless whores and men shooting or hanging themselves in their cold attics. Of course there had been men who had survived the war intact in both mind and body, of course murder was rare, of course there were honourable Generals and bankers, of course there were sweet-natured and chaste women in Germany, of course suicide remained an exception. But artists like Grosz and Dix were not concerned with reasoned discourse – the times demanded an art of protest and accusation. It may have been an art based on an 'inner-image' that distorted reality - but it was done with a moral purpose. Their art became a ticker-tape from the front lines of existence.

      Expressionist artists like Van Gogh, Ensor, Munch, Holder, Kirchner and Nolde were typically egotistical, technically incompetent (at least in the traditional academic sense) and emotionally unstable. Many only worked in an Expressionist manner for a short time in their twenties and early thirties. Some like Paula Modersohn-Becker and Richard Gerstl died long before it had become a recognized movement. Some grew and developed into fully rounded masters like Beckman. While others like Kirchner grew tired of the fight and their work became more decorative and conciliatory. Many like Munch and Ensor outlived their creativity - and merely rehashed their past achievement's. But the raw honesty of their art shone brightly in a world of fake polite paintings for fake polite people. They had a message - they wanted humanity to hear – and pursued their vision with messianic devotion. Their tragedy was that their messages were often not to be understood for decades - if at all.   Many of them were sexist pigs - and their portrayal of women in their art was often cruel and misogynistic. No other artistic movement has portrayed women so savagely. Women in Expressionist paintings were typically femme fatales, fierce dominatrix's, demonic venuses, cunning heartless prostitutes and overwhealming earth mothers from hell – just look at Munch, Kirchner, Grosz, Dix or later Dubuffet and De Kooning. These were old-fashioned men who often divided women into Madonnas' and whores' - wives' and prostitutes'. However at other times there was a heartbreaking tenderness to Expressionist depictions of women - just look at Kokoschka's painting of Alma Mahler, Schiele's paintings of his wife Edith, or Max Beckman's paintings of his wife Quappi – and tell me these men did not have a heart.     Moreover if you compared their depictions of themselves and other men - you would be hard pressed to say that they did not hate themselves just as much. No one for example has ever painted fat, ugly, greedy, vicious men with such condemnation as George Grosz.      The great masters of Expressive art were in my view; Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Theodore Gericault, Honore Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, James Esnor, Lovis Corinth, Kees van Dongen, Paula Mondersohn-Becker, Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Alexei von Jawlensky, Paula, Georges Rouault, Amadeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Chaim Soutine, Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Jackson Pollock, William De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Asger Jorn, Jean Atlan, Francis Gruber, Jean Fautrier, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, George Baselitz, John Bellany, Anselm Kiefer, Frank Aurebach, Leon Kossoff, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck Connelly and Hughie O'Donoghue. These were my heroes. In their work I found a depth of feeling and perception utterly lacking in other modern art. Their styles varied enormously but what they all had in common was genuine soul.                The tradition of Expressionist painting was also one of the few strong threads that ran through Modern Irish art. For example, Jack B. Yeats in the 1930's painted in a style similar to Chaim Soutine – his contemporary who was working in France.  Later, Neo-Expressionist Irish painters like Paul Kane, Michael Cullen, Brian Maguire and Paddy Graham all went through Expressionist phases.      

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It is easy to write about Impressionism, Cubism and the School of Paris without ever mentioning the socio-political background to their art. One can waffle on and on about high flown aesthetic problems and art world bitching without ever talking about the Dreyfus Affair, The Great War or European politics. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why French art has proved so popular as a grand distraction from lifes intractable problems. The same cannot be said of the German Expressionists.    The fin-de-secle world of nineteenth century Europe - was one of unprecedented technological, social and political change. It was a time of optomisim and dispair. In France in 1848 and 1871 two revolutionary movements had failed - and by the end of the century - intellectuals in Europe increasingly expressed pessimistic fears for society and politics. Many thought that the western world had become decadent and would eventually succumb to the stronger races they currently colonized. Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection and the survival of the fittest became a fearful talking-point amongst intellectuals and a manifesto of survival for middle-class capitalists and elietist Empire builders. Through out Europe, nationalism, class-warfare, anti-semitism, misogyny and racism reared their ugly heads as the power and certainty of the old elites were challenged by; a growing arms race, an unregulated financial system, the suffragette movement and a fear of the 'other'. Yet apart from a few honourable men and women like Courbet, Millet and Daumier in France and Kathe Kollwitz in Germany – only a handful of major artists of the day reflected this social upheaval, decadence, corruptness and social injustness in their art.

      In literature writers like Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Strindberg and Kierkegaard all expressed this new age of religious, sexual, urban and moral anxiety. However it was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who became their prophet and guiding light out of a corrupted world of moral hypocrisy.   In his Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky contrasted the materialistic ethos - of the late nineteenth century (that had culminated for him in England's building of The Crystal Palace in 1851), against many peoples increasing search for an authentic and unbroken faith in God and pursuit of a spiritual life. Dostoevsky's passionate, intellectual, spiritual and even revolutionary writings exposed the unjustness and decadency of modern life. Often as in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment - he did this by bringing his readers into the minds of marginalized, poverty stricken and half-mad men who still strove to find the light in lives of darkness. "I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too… As far as my own personal opinion is concerned, to care only for prosperity seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Crystal Palace" it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a "crystal palace", if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I am sure man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why after all, suffering, is the sole origin of consciousness… [And] consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to two times two makes four." (Notes from Underground, 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky). This search for authentic expression was to become a key concern for the German generation of 1905.    The German character was a complex one – but it was known for intellectualism, a love of the arts and philosophy - as well as greatly skilled at war. Goethe spoke of this to Eckermann: "The Germans really are a strange lot, they make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves by looking for deep thoughts and ideas everywhere and putting them into everything. Just have the courage to give yourself up to the first impressions… don't think all the time that everything must be pointless if it lacks an abstract thought or idea." (Quoted by Norbert Lynton, Concepts of Modern Art, Ed. Nikos Stangos, Chapter Three, Expressionism, Revised Edition, P.35, 1981).     Germany was a federal state in the 1900's. Although Berlin was the political and artistic capital - other regional cities like; Munich, Cologne, Dresden and Hanover all had their own local governments, art schools, galleries and museums – vying for prestige. Germany for good or ill was the centre of world events from the 1900's-1945. It was an age of xenophobia and chauvinism. In France right wing parties attacked Modern art as a German or Jewish conspiracy. In Germany, it was attacked by similar parties - as a French, Bolshevik or Jewish conspiracy.               The battle for the heart and soul of Germany was bitterly fought between the conservative and the liberal, the socialist and the Fascist, the avant-guard and the academic. This social, intellectual and finally violent confrontation of ideas was anticipated and visualized by the German Expressionists and Neue Sachlichkeit artists.          Germany from the late eighteenth century untill the end of the nineteeth century had been enthralled by the achievements of the ancient Greeks. Museums heaved with masterpieces discovered in Greece, Turkey and the Middle East – the greatest of which was the famous Pergamon Alter discovered in Turkey and transported to Berlin. German architecture of the day was born from grand Greek moulds, German philosophers debated Socrates and Plato ad nausum - and countless German painters like the Nazerines made trips to Greece and Italy - in order to educate and refine their provinical taste. The Prussian historian, archaeologist and antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) – who some consider the "father of art history"– lead, defined and defended this love of Hellenistic culture in his voloumous writings - which had a massive influence on academic Classical theories for nearly two hundred years. Yet for the generation of 1905 this obsession with classical order, reason, grace and power - was oppressive and cliched. In an early book on tribal art which Emil Nolde hoped to later publish - he began with these two key points which summed up the attitude of many young artists in Germany:

   1. "'We see the highest art in the Greeks. In painting, Raphael is the greatest of all masters.' This was what every art pedagogue taught twenty or thirty years ago.
   2. Some things have changed since then. We don't like Raphael and the sculptures of the so-called flowering of Greek art leaves us cold. Our predecessors' ideals are no longer ours. We like less the works under which great names have stood for centuries. Sophisticated artists in the hustle and bustle of their times made art for Popes and palaces. We value and love the unassuming people who worked in their workshops, of whom we barely know anything today, for their simple and largely-hewn sculptures in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg, Bamberg." (Quoted from Expressionism by Ashley Bassie, Kent: Grange Books, P.28, 2005).    

Seeking a new and authentic Germanic artistic voice, many in Germany rediscovered the art of the middle-ages and the German Gothic. In 1912 Wilhelm Worringer a young history student wrote for his doctorate an influential text called Formprobleme der Gothic (Form in Gothic). In this thesis he studied the illuminated manuscripts and sculptures, the ivories and glass paintings of the Eleventh to thirteenth centuries and the oil paintings of the Middle-Ages – from the eleventh to the fifteenth century.  Worringer contrasted the naturalistic and sensual art of Classicism with the more alienated, linear, abstract-tending, transcendentalism art of the Northern Gothic artist. It had a profound influence on German and Northern artists who recognized the difference of their world-view from that of the joi de vive of Mediterranean cultures. His text articulated the complex nature of "the transcendentalism of the Gothic world of expression." Which he said required that, "uncanny pathos which attaches itself to the animation of the inorganic." While in the warm and comforting south man felt at ease and in communion with arcadia – in the colder and more inhospitable north – he felt estranged and troubled by nature. Which gave northern art its restless, anxious and abstracted character. "The need in Northern man for activity, which is precluded from being translated into a clear knowledge of actuality and which is intensified for lack of this natural solution, finally disburdens itself in an unhealthy play of fantasy. Actuality, which the Gothic man could not transform into naturalness by means of clear-sighted knowledge, was overpowered by this intensified play of fantasy and transformed into a spectrally heightened and distorted actuality. Everything becomes weird and fantastic. Behind the visible appearance of a thing lurks its caricature, behind the lifelessness of a thing an uncanny, ghostly life, and so all actual things become grotesque… common to all is an urge to activity, which, being bound to no one object, loses itself as a result in infinity."      The reason this text was so timely and important was because it not only perfectly described the creepy, anxious, transcendentalism of Gothic artists like Cranach, Bosch and Bruegel – it also gave a defining shape to the still perplexing art of contemporaries of Worringer like; Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Ferdinand Hodler, James Ensor, Emil Nolde and even Wassily Kandinsky – where one could find this self-same Gothic restless energy, near abstraction of reality and alienated intensification of feeling.             Another great influnce came from Norway, when in 1892, Edvard Munch's work was shown in Berlin it caused public hysteria, scandal and rabid press indignation - which lead to the show being closed after just one week. However it also fired the imagination of a whole generation of young painters and writers in Germany who recognized his genius.         The final great visual influnce on German Expressionism was not European in origin – it was the vivid and powerful tribal art of Africa. They recognized its beauty and pathos – and saw that it offered a completely different alternative to the fossilized art of the academies and salons.     As the historian Donald E. Gordon pointed out the Expressionist generation of 1905 - were Left-Wing Nietzscheians, Post-Victorians and Post-Impressionists. They were highly contradictory characters at once playing the part of rebels and social critics, decadents and prophets of doom.

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In 1905 – two young architecture students in Dresden called Erik Heckel (1883-) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) with their friends Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884) and Fritz Bleyl founded Die Brucke (The Bridge) - the first major group of painters to follow an Expressionist agenda. All these artists were men on a mission.                Karl Schmidt-Rottluff coined the name. The exact reason for his choice is unclear, perhaps it was a nod to the many bridges of Dresden – often called the "Venice of the North". Perhaps it was also an attempt to make an explicit connection with Nietzsche. "I love him whose soul is deep even in its ability to be wounded, and whom even a little thing can destroy: thus he is glad to go over the bridge." (Fredrick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Their philosophy was embodied in Nietzsche's 'overman' and his view of culture as a battle between the Apollonian (Classical order) and Dionysian (Panthestic and Baroque emotion). Of course they believed in the later.              They were all very young men in their early twenties. They had virtually no training in painting or drawing and this self-taught ethos would inform (and at times undermine) the nature of their work. They saw art as a brotherhood, worshiped nature, espoused and lived free-love, and wanted to reach the masses with their work. They befriended circus people, music-hall performers, gypsies and prostitutes – their friendships based on similar free-thinking, free-living and marginalized poverty. They sought to free their minds – and adopt an almost automatic form of painting.

            A few other major artists joined this group for varying degrees of time, they included; Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Muller. Pechstein was technically the odd-one-out having had a sound grounding in academic skills – so it is not surprising that he was the first to really make money from his easier to read art – and even be hailed as one of the greatest in Europe. Since then however his work has slipped down the greasy-pole of critical thinking – largely because for an Expressionist painter he was too slick.              Die Brucke as a group lasted eight years. A reasonably long time given the short life-span of most modernist movements. However once the thrill of brotherhood - was overtaken by selfish concerns for; personal glory, fame and money – it bitterly fell apart.        The artists of Die Brucke shared studios, materials, life-models and printing presses. They published manifestos together, staged group shows and promoted themselves as a young energetic group - trying to take on and reform the world. In many ways they were naturists and hippies before their time. It was a form of "cultivated rebellion" by largely middleclass young men.            They were sick of the received wisdom of the academic ethos, its slick techniques, classical ideology and almost total lack of imagination or genuine emotion. Although their techniques were radically different from that of realist painters – they shared their concern with down-to-earth subjects of everyday life.            The painters of Die Brucke used non-descriptive colouring and crude forceful drawing. They loathed abstraction - which was to over-take them in influence on Modern Art - yet had been born from their lair. All these artists aspired to a direct, unfiltered, non-conformist form of painting that they hoped would communicate directly with the viewer. Thus they shaped their working methods accordingly. They prized quick free-hand drawing and painting styles - which they hoped would capture the movement, speed and anxieties of modern life. They wanted to paint manly pictures – seemingly dashed off in a day - full of youthful vigour and aesthetic confrontation. They used deliberately clashing colours, rapid and thick brushstrokes, distortions of space and architecture and intense, overall compositional schemes.   Their wood-cut prints were ideal for self-promotion. The simple, effective and very strong look of these black and white prints worked perfectly with Expressionist grammar. Wood-cuts had first been used widely in the Gothic period and reached its technical and unsurpassed zenith with Durer. However it had fallen out of favour with the advent of more advanced printing methods like engraving, etching and lithography. They deliberately used crude and quick methods of carving which would be big on impact – though limited in skill.          Watercolour was also an ideal medium for their spontaneous working methods and they produced some of the liveliest and most original works in this medium of the century. Given their poverty - it also proved a cheap alternative to oil painting. Georges Rouault, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele in particular - were dynamic and daring masters of this medium.

       To my mind Kirchner and Nolde were the greatest of artists of Die Brucke.  Although Nolde had joined the group in 1906 he reamined essentially a loner. Nolde was a more daring colourist – and perhaps a profounder painter than Kirchner. However Kirchner's scope was larger both in terms of subject, content, and mediums. He was a stunningly handsome man – who painted many self-portraits throughout his career – usually looking haggard and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He produced oil and distemper paintings on canvas, board and paper, watercolours, wood-cut prints, sculptures and even some tapestries. He used his paint straight from the tube or mixed petrol with to make it dry faster and used colour combinations as daring and personal to him as Matisse's were to him. The foundation of all this work - was over 20,000 surviving drawings in pencil, ink and crayon. They were hasty drawings - made as he moved through the city – or quick figure studies of friends and models. He developed a rapid almost calligraphic style of drawing – which he called 'hieroglyphs' – a kind of simplified visual coda. His subjects included landscapes, portraits, nudes, circus and music hall scenes. Strangely he also wrote on many occasions about his own work – trying to secure his place in history – under the pseodonym of a French doctor called Louis de Marsalle. In later years he even back-dated his early work in an attempt to secure an even greater place for himself in the Modern art race.

      When I was a young boy - I would enjoy looking at Nolde's medium sized canvas 'Two Women In A Garden' 1915, in our National Gallery in Dublin. Even then I wondered at its oddity in the Irish National Gallery collection - where it stuck out like a sore thumb - amidst the largely French Modern Art collection. Only the Chaim Soutine hung beside it shared its spirit. It was not a great Nolde – I thought it rather over-worked and lacked the intensity and enflamed colour of his greatest work, however it was one of the few emotive works I could identify with in an Irish collection.     The intensity of Nolde's creativity was evident in all his work – sometimes for good – sometimes for ill. Unlike the other Brucke painters – whose canvases were constructed through the dynamic use of line - Nolde was a painterly painter. So much so that his treatment of form was often crude and ignorant. However his gestural filling in of space – gave his paintings an intensity and crude brutality – others like Max Pechstein could only dream of achieving. He was also one of the most aggressive and daring colourist of the Twentieth Century.         As he grew older Noldes work became more spiritual and religious in motovation. He wanted to breath new life into the stories of the Bible – yet his crude technique and sour and sweet plastered colours - made many think him sacraligious. Nolde felt a strong identification with Van Gogh and like many in Europe he read his letters avidly. This quote from Van Gogh's letters perfectly expressed the creative longing of artists like Nolde who followed this lonely path: "I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create…I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to confer by the actual radiance and vibration of our colourings." (Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, Arles, early September 1888, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Ed. Mark Roskill. London: Flamingo, P. 286, 1983). Both artists' shared a burning desire to make a 'dead God' - come back to life through the power of art.

      Emil Nolde was not the only German Expressionist painter - swayed by German nationalism before World War One. However he was one of the few Modern painters to be seduced by anti-Semitism and the Nazi party. I love his paintings but this still sticks in my throat. He was a rural man – and they are often the most anti-intellectual, reactionary and right-wing types - regardless of the nation or era involved. Nolde the artist was a radical – Nolde the political man was naïve at best. Debates about the moral responsibility of artists - have raged throught-out time. Personally I can still greatly admire and even love Nolde's paintings even if I despise his politics and his type - which are reborn every year in different guises. Despite his early passionate support of the Nazi party – they did not return the compliment. In 1937, Nolde was represented - by the largest group of paintings in the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerated Art) exhibition. He was banned from painting and his materials where taken from him. Yet he managed to paint over 1,300 small watercolours during this period in secret. He called them the ungemalte Bilder ('unpainted pictures').            

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By 1913 conservative critics in Germany were attacking Expressionism as the crude daubs of lunatics - desperate to be noticed. In an age of growing militarism – artists' were a nuisance - to say the least. The German public too - were suspicious of the ugliness and tendency towards caricature in Expressionism. On the eve of the First World War and during its height another great German Expressionist emerged – the Jewish painter, draughtsman, print maker, poet and writer Ludwig Meidner. He is the forgotten man of German Expressionism because he never associated with the other major groups. He preferred the company of writers and poets - yet he was archetypal Expressionist – a lonely, isolated man with a burning desire to express his feelings and fears as immediately as possible. His work was a strange self-taught mix of Rembrandt and Van Gogh gone mad with the colours and dynamics of Delaunay. His major subjects were portraits and cityscapes - which he called 'Apocalyptic Landscapes'. Sometimes he combined the two in a terrifying edge-of-the-volcano manner. In his cityscapes - Meidner projected his fears and realities – renting buildings apart with bombs, explosions and earthquakes. They had the feel of apparitions of a mad prophet in the wilderness of the city.

      His portraits and self-portraits were ugly in the extreme – however they hook you instantly with their humble and heartbroken honesty. Meidner – made-no-attempt to flatter - either his sitters or himself. In 1912 he formed a group of painters under the name Die Pathetiker (the solemn ones) but it proved short lived. Conforming to the general rule of Expressionism - Meidner put so much into his early paintings - that he burned himself out quickly. The peak of his art was from 1911-1916 after which he concentrated on more religious paintings  expressing his Jewish heritage.     He was also a prolific and talented writer of Expressionist inspired prose and dynamic directional drawings. He loved the art of drawing and wrote about it very powerfully as this excerpt testifies: "We have loved drawing from way back, we stupid, playful, laughing humans. From the first charming stammerings of primitive people to Kokoschka and Hermann Huber; from Raphael's disciplined style to the pornographic doodles on our piss-house walls. Drawing makes you happy, healthy and a believer. I'm always alone. No girl loves me. No woman wants to sleep with me. No friend wants to be with me. I have no home, no country, am poor, outlawed and much hated... but I can draw, freely swing here and there... and I rejoice with the pencil, sing, pray and praise the Great Almighty." (Quoted from Expressionist Portraits, Frank Whitford, London: Thames and Hudson, P.92, 1987).

      World War One finished of Expressionism as a revolutionary movement. The optimism of the pre-war years - had been replaced with shell-shock, social and political disillusion and savage cynicism. After The Great War, commercialized Expressionism in Germany became a bandwagon – jumped on by opportunists. Because it was the only country to foster Expressionist art – it was also the only country where its mannerisms became imitated for profit. With the result, that much of late German Expressionism, was tainted by the fraudulent canvases of opportunists and charlatans of neither talent, vision nor authenticity. Even the credible artists of the early years - began mass-producing their work to feed an insatiable market. Thus many who had supported the first flowerings of Expressionism - became disenchanted by its growing fakeness.        After the disaster of the First World War, Neue Sachlichkeit (in English New Objectivity) artists in Germany like George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckman produced work deeply influenced by the visual intensities of Expressionism – however it was given a more realistic, bitter, technically skilled and socially conscious shape. Colour was more controlled and full of pathos and their line was more biting. All of these artists - in reaction to the idealism of the early Expressionists - chose to play the part of social-agitators and critics. Gone were the utopian notions of sexual equality, brotherhood and freedom – and in their place were powerless feelings of cynicism, condemnation, disenchantment and disgust.    German Expressionism was finished off in 1933 – with the Election of Hitler. Many artists fled the country, those that stayed found their teaching jobs axed, their work taken off the walls of the museums, their studios ransacked, their materials taken from them – and in 1937 - their work held up as depraved and insane in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition. Worse was to come as historian Ashley Bassie in her book on Expressionism noted: "On 20th March 1939, around 5,000 paintings, prints and drawings, most of which were by Expressionist artists, were burned having been determined as "unverwertbarer Bestand" (property of no value)." (Bassie, Ashley Expressionism. Kent: Grange Books, P. 172, 2005.)   After the Second world War – attempts where strenuously made in Germany to recover Germanys cultural heritage and redress these outrageous acts against human creativity. Those artists like Karl Hofer, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, Pechstein, Nolde and Dix - who were still alive - were showered with honours, retrospectives and academy teaching posts.