Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [108]
After their marriage the couple set a new standard for sexual liberty. Each blatantly pursued numerous extramarital affairs, Georgia O‘Keeffe with both men and women. An FBI file described her as an ultraliberal security risk. In their work, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were also risk-takers. He championed the latest trends in the arts and took landmark photographs. She was a pioneer of artistic liberty who once said, “Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.”
O‘Keeffe, “City Night,” 1926, Minneapolis Institute of Arts. O’Keeffe reduces skyscrapers to polished, streamlined forms like architectural drawings.
EXPRESSIONISM: THE FINE ART OF FEELING
In Germany, a group known as the Expressionists insisted art should express the artist’s feelings rather than images of the real world. From 1905-30 Expressionism, the use of distorted, exaggerated forms and colors for emotional impact, dominated German art.
This subjective trend, which is the foundation of much twentieth-century art, began with van Gogh, Gauguin, and Munch in the late nineteenth century and continued with Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1949) and Austrian painters Gustave Klimt (1862-1918), Egon Schiele (1890-1918), and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). But it was in Germany, with two separate groups called Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, that Expressionism reached maturity.
DIE BRÜCKE: BRIDGING THE GAP. Founded in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Die Brücke (pronounced dee BROOCK eh) was the earliest German group to seize the avant-garde spirit. The name means “bridge”; its members believed their work would be a bridge to the future. “To attract all revolutionary and fermenting elements,” its credo claimed, “that is the purpose implied in the name ‘Brücke.’” The group demanded “freedom of life and action against established and older forces.” Until Die Brücke dissolved in 1913, the artists lived and worked communally, first in Dresden then in Berlin, producing intense, anguished pictures with harshly distorted forms and clashing colors. “He who renders his inner convictions as he knows he must, and does so with spontaneity and sincerity, is one of us,” Kirchner proclaimed.
The major contribution of the Expressionists was a revival of the graphic arts, especially the woodcut. With dramatic black-and-white contrasts, crude forms, and jagged lines, woodcuts perfectly expressed the sickness of the soul that was a major subject of Expressionist art.
Kirchner, “Berlin Street Scene,” 1913, Brücke Museum, Berlin. Kirchner distorted figures into grotesque, jagged forms to portray their inner corruption.
THE HORROR OF WAR
Kollwitz, “Infant Mortality,” 1925, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) focused on pacifist subjects and the suffering of the poor. Like the later German Expressionist Max Beckmann, she was Expressionist in technique but concerned more with social protest than inner exploration. A master printmaker in etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, Kollwitz used stark forms and harsh lines to express the tragic loss in war’s aftermath. “Infant Mortality” evokes a mother’s despair at her baby’s death, through the woodcut’s intense blackness.
KIRCHNER: LIFE IS A CABARET. Kirchner (pronounced KEAR kner) summed up the movement: “My goal was always to express emotion and experience with large and simple forms and clear colors.” His series of street scenes and cabaret dancers display the brutal angularity linked with Expressionism. After World War I his style became even more frenzied and morbid until,