Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [109]
NOLDE: UNMASKING THE DEMON WITHIN. The painter Emil Nolde (pronounced NOHL day; 1867-1956) is an example of how Expressionists borrowed from tribal and oceanic art to revitalize decadent Western culture. Nolde saw in primitive art the vigor his age lacked. Like the Belgian painter Ensor, Nolde gave his human figures hideous, masklike faces to suggest a deformed spirit. He used garish colors, coarse forms, and ghoulish figures to communicate the evil of prewar Germany. Nolde was so intent on forcefully expressing the ugliness around him that he threw away his brushes and wiped thick blotches of pigment on the canvas with rags. His paintings were so shocking, mothers threatened unruly children, “If you don’t behave, Nolde will come and get you, and smear you all over his canvas.”
DER BLAUE REITER: COLOR ALONE. The second, more loosely organized vanguard group of the German Expressionists was called the Blue Rider (pronounced dehr BLAH way RIGHT er in German), after a painting by its leader Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Founded in Munich around 1911, this group’s most oustanding artists were Kandinsky and Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940). Although the movement disintegrated with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, it had a lasting effect because of Kandinsky’s breakthrough to pure abstraction.
KANDINSKY: INVENTOR OF ABSTRACT ART. The Russian painter Kandinsky was first to abandon any reference to recognizable reality in his work. He came to this revolutionary discovery by accident. Around 1910, when he returned at twilight to his studio, he recalled, “I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered I stopped; staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright color-patches. Finally I approached closer and, only then, recognized it for what it was — my own painting, standing on its side on the easel.”
This insight — that color could convey emotion irrespective of content — spurred Kandinsky to take the bold step of discarding realism altogether. He experimented with two types of paintings: “Compositions,” in which he consciously arranged geometric shapes, and “Improvisations,” where he exerted no conscious control over the paint he applied spontaneously. With rainbow-bright colors and loose brushwork, Kandinsky created completely nonobjective paintings with titles like “Composition No. 2,” as abstract as his canvases.
Kandinsky, “Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle),” 1913, NG, Washington, DC. Kandinsky painted the first abstract canvases in which shape and color, not subject, are the expressive factors.
KLEE: CHILD’S PLAY. “Color has got me,” Klee (pronounced clay) exclaimed on a trip to North Africa when he was 24, “I and color are one.” Throughout his career, color and line were the elements by which Klee expressed his offbeat outlook on life. He once declared, “Were I a god, I would found an order whose banner consisted of tears doing a gay dance. ”
Klee’s work, like Matisse’s, is deceptively simple, and for both this was the desired effect. Klee consciously imitated the dreamlike magic of children’s art by reducing his forms to direct shapes full of ambiguity. “I want to be as though newborn,” he wrote, “to be almost primitive.” Klee mistrusted rationality, which he felt simply got in the way and could even be destructive. In search of a deeper truth, he compared his art to the root system of a tree, which, nourished by subterranean imagery, “collects what comes from the depth and passes it on.”
The respect for inner vision made Klee study archaic signs such as hex symbols, hieroglyphics, and cave markings, which he felt held some primitive power to evoke nonverbal meanings. His later paintings use rune-like ideograms to encode his reaction to the world. “Blue Night” divides the sky into patchwork planes of cool to warm color, bounded by mysterious lines. The lines could mark constellation patterns or represent some forgotten alphabet.