Expressionism in Austria Developed Independently Of, but Simultaneously with the German Movement of the Same Name
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THE EXPRESSIONIST BREAKTHROUGH Expressionism in Austria developed independently of, but simultaneously with the German movement of the same name. To some extent, the two nations shared common traditions: a deep engagement with Symbolism, which was in part a legacy of Northern European humanism, and a tendency to use Art Nouveau formal devices not just as surface decoration, but as a means of depicting representational subject matter. (This is the chief way in which Jugendstil differs from its French antecedent.) However, as German modernists in the first decade of the twentieth century began exploring the foreign developments that had superseded Symbolism and Art Nouveau, Austrians remained bound to older prototypes. Austrian artists were more interested in Munch than Picasso, preferred Van Gogh to Matisse. The principal Austrian Expressionists—Schiele, Kokoschka, and the less well-known painters Richard Gerstl and Max Oppenheimer (“Mopp”)—retained more notice- able vestiges of academic realism in their work than did their German counterparts. This connection to a reality shared by their audience gave Austria’s Expressionists a greater capacity to convey comprehensible psychological insights. The Symbolists, including Gustav Klimt, were essentially interested in finding visual correlatives to illustrate and explain the human condition. Allegory, common to both Symbolism and historicism, was Klimt’s preferred device for achieving this end. Munch and Van Gogh, on the other hand, demonstrated that the human con- dition could also be explored by focusing on simple, everyday subjects (figs. pp. 26–29). Schiele, inspired by all three artists, would use both approaches inter- changeably in his work. Nonetheless, Klimt remained his most profound influence. Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1911, Given his own early encounters with mortality, the younger artist identified Leopold Museum, Vienna strongly with the blunt and essentially pessimistic view expressed in the master’s allegories: death is a central fact of life; beauty fades; everyone is born to suffer and eventually die, and human attempts to intervene are futile (fig. left). Schiele further recognized that the lush ornamentation of Klimt’s ostensibly cheery landscapes and portraits was a metaphorical denial of death that actually accentuated the very thing it purported to conceal. He understood that the line sep- arating subject from background was analogous to the divide between being and nothingness, and that the blank sheet or canvas was analogous to death. From Jugendstil in general, and Klimt in particular, Schiele derived a sensitivity to negative space and a last- ing fixation on and mastery of expressive line. 30.