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Home , August Macke, Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt, Rosa Schapire

Wall Texts

Introduction

No two other styles were as intensely and unsparingly contrasted with one another in their time as and . Impressionism is inextricably linked with France and with artists such as , , and Auguste Renoir. The German Impressionism of , , and developed in the 1890s as a response to the movement in France. A fierce backlash followed shortly thereafter with the advent of Expressionism, spearheaded by painters such as , , , and in . The simultaneous emergence of these two styles provided critics and theorists with an ideal basis to compare the seemingly antithetical cultures of France and Germany. It was gallery owner Herwarth Walden who first spoke of a ‘turning point’ in the transition from Im(pressionism) to Ex(pressionism).

Despite the stark distinction that would later be drawn between the two styles, Impressionism and early Expressionism share surprisingly many characteristics. Both movements take an anti-academic stance, hold in high regard, portray immediate experiences of light and colour, and focus on the material details of the artists’ surroundings. In addition, subjectivity and the individual character of each artist’s brushwork were highly prized among exponents of both artistic movements.

The Nationalgalerie is closely tied to the history of artists working in both styles. Through its director, Hugo von Tschudi, the Nationalgalerie was the first museum in the world to acquire Impressionist , beginning in 1896 even before the museums. Tschudi’s successor, Ludwig Justi, on the other hand, amassed a spectacular collection of Expressionist works after 1918 for the new wing of the Nationalgalerie, at the former crown prince’s palace on Unter den Linden. Moreover, Justi developed a ‘School of Seeing’ over many years, which aimed to elucidate the particular characteristics of various artworks by comparing them to one another.

Bathers

Variations on the theme of the bather in pastoral and idyllic settings have been found since antiquity. figures became a major motif in the paintings of late Impressionism and Expressionism as well. Paul Cézanne's images of unclothed men or women by the water, were not painted from nature but were carefully conceived and staged in his studio. They became the much-admired ideal for artists from both movements. The naked bodies which no longer met ideals of beauty, the absence of a mythological overlay and the reduction of shapes and spatial relationships all had a provocative effect. They inspired Cézanne’s contemporaries Pissarro, Degas, and Renoir from the end of the nineteenth century, and later influenced German artists such as Liebermann, Kirchner, and Pechstein. The modernist representations of bathers outdoors in nature, at the Moritzburg lakes and on the beaches of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea were based on a dream of a benevolent togetherness, close to nature and far from the stifling rules of the bourgeois world. Other painters looked for true ‘primitiveness’ in the South Seas, among the natives of Tahiti or Papua New Guinea. At the same time, however, the artists’ representations of people bathing, resting, or drying themselves also celebrate the pure joy of living and the appeal of nudity.

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City, Suburb, Pedestrians

Impressionism and Expressionism are urban cultures. Artists from both movements discovered the beauty of the growing metropolises for themselves: from the 1860s, Claude Monet and his fellow Impressionists were inspired by Paris, while from 1900, the Expressionists focused mainly on . Both cities were a source of artistic innovations in their time. Rapidly changing cities with their increasingly busy streets, glittering lights, broad boulevards, and bustling squares became a key motif for artists. In 1863, Charles Baudelaire described a painter wandering through as a flâneur: ‘He is looking for that something which you must permit me to call modernity.’ That ‘something’ also included darting pedestrians and cocottes in the city at night, the new means of transport and electric lights. Cityscapes seen by rain, fog or snow helped artists including and Lesser Ury, as well as and , to make a variety of artistic discoveries. The artists’ subjective sensibilities, which were a product of their respective time, are captured in these images. The motif of the bridge crops up surprisingly often, including both traditional bridges over rivers and the new railway bridges. Frequently, it is precisely these pictures that testify to a poetic treatment of the cityscape, by means of reflections in the water and the depiction of space in atmospheric tones.

Out of Doors

The idea and experience of leisure time developed in the nineteenth century as a result of urbanization and industrialization, which entailed a life with fixed working hours. Leisure was seen as the private part of one’s life, and was regarded as a counterweight to the all-consuming world of work. Peace and quiet, amusing diversions and stimulating time spent together with friends and family offered a change of scene and the chance to relax. Recently constructed railways allowed members of the working class and middle class to travel to the city’s outskirts and into the countryside, away from the noise and stench of the metropolis. The Impressionists and Expressionists also heeded the call of the countryside and sought to redefine their relationship with nature within the context of recreational spaces. Here, even more than in the city, they employed the technique of painting en plein air using tubes of paint invented around 1840, which dried up less quickly and were easy to transport. River banks, meadows, and gardens, public parks, zoos, and lively spots in restaurants along the Seine in Paris or the Alster lake in Hamburg served as the artists’ subjects. Impressionism and Expressionism were the last modern and comprehensive styles to provide an unmediated, realistic view of ordinary people’s everyday lives.

Country Homes

The urge to travel to the countryside is as old as the city itself, dating back to antiquity. Representations of villas in the verdant locations can be found in Pliny and Vitruvius, forming the models on which architects and land owners based their country estates as late as the nineteenth century. Most of these homes were surrounded by carefully landscaped gardens and parks and were viewed as places of relaxation and repose. Shielded from the outside world, these estates served as retreats from the hectic bustle of the city, offering their owners not only a chance to connect with nature but also to increase their social standing.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the garden became a popular and important motif for the avant-garde due to purely artistic reasons. Representations of gardens were not subject to an established tradition but rather were set in opposition to the generic canons of academic painting. Many artists including Claude Monet, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt, and Emil Nolde acquired a

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garden of their own. These gardens provided with a place to linger and offered the painter an appropriate range of subjects he might study under the most varied light and weather conditions. The phenomenon of the painter’s garden stems from this period. The play of colours itself was easily as important as observing the light and the effect of the atmosphere on the colours.

Diversions

The variety of establishments found in cities offered numerous options for socializing. Beginning in the 1850s, song and dance interludes offered by restaurants and known as ‘café-concerts’ were especially popular. Such venues supplied the stage for the female clown Cha-U-Kao to perform, for the chanson singer Emélie Bécat to sing risqué songs, and for can-can dancers to flounce their skirts. Vaudeville theatres such as the Moulin Rouge or the dance hall at the Moulin de la Galette in the district of Paris also proved attractive. Ballets, operas and operettas, cabarets, theatres, fairgrounds, and circuses were part of a firmly established entertainment industry. Conversations over drinks in smoky pubs and restaurants led to fleeting sexual encounters – and lively artistic exchanges. describes the coffeehouse as a preferred location for meetings, diversions, and pleasures. Yet an oppressive undercurrent often permeated this tremendous bustle, which many painters found particularly striking and worthy of representation. In 1863, Charles Baudelaire described the artist Constantin Guys, the dégagé flâneur of nighttime Paris, as a ‘painter of modern life’. Kirchner and Nolde recorded their experiences exploring Berlin’s nightlife for inspiration in very similar terms.

Relationships

The traditional roles of men and women shifted alongside the social and economic changes of the nineteenth century. This period gave rise to the concept of the distinct individual. Popular magazines and novels were filled with such themes as marriages of convenience or love, romantic affairs, and personal tragedies. Writers created striking psychological portraits of failed marriages: the era of Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Hedda Gabler commenced in the 1850s. French and German Impressionism and early Expressionism originated from similar social conditions. Both movements produced a surprising number of pictures of couples and families, many of which were remarkably large in size. In a deliberate rejection of a Biedermeier-era family idyll, these paintings do not simply reflect reality, but rather show new models for familial roles. They emphasize the specific character of the individual rather than a couple’s togetherness or a family’s sense of belonging. Those painted are often turning or looking in different directions. Manet’s work, for example, is characterized by the vacant gaze of some of his subjects. Thus, in various ways, these pictures reflect the shifting gender dynamic of the late nineteenth century.

Artists

Impressionists and Expressionists alike painted themselves in numerous pair and family portraits. Similarly, the standalone artist self-portrait is a recording of a particular moment. It simultaneously expresses an idealized role and functions as an autobiographical statement. Max Slevogt shows himself as a youthful artist, unconventional and approachable. Lovis Corinth stares critically at his mirror image – he finds himself at a crossroads in his life. Max Liebermann, in contrast, consistently represents himself as self-confident. Here, he depicts himself standing in front of his own paintings, wearing a white painter’s apron over a suit. In his self-portrait, Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff set himself apart from the ‘superficial’ paintwork of the Impressionists. A monocle glints in one eye, while

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his other eye is closed. And Ludwig Meidner, who belonged to the group known as the ‘Pathetiker’, looks alert and piercing in his self-portrait. Portraits of fellow painter friends are less likely to contain this element of scrutiny. Corinth painted Berlin founder as the epitome of the ‘en plein air’ painter. portrayed his friend Franz Marc as a discriminating interpreter of the world, with great empathy for animals and his fellow man.

Art Mediators

Paul and Bruno Cassirer, Julius Meier-Graefe, Hermann Bahr, Herwarth Walden, Rosa Schapire, and many other art lovers promoted new trends outside the official academic art market in Wilhelmine Germany. Collectors and dealers, curators and critics made a strong case for Impressionism and Expressionism. Hugo von Tschudi, then the director of the Nationalgalerie, was important for both art movements. He was the first to buy paintings by French Impressionists for a German museum. And, around the same time, the almanac , edited by the Expressionists and Franz Marc, was dedicated to him. Critics and theorists engaged with both Impressionism and Expressionism, reaching a wide audience through their books, catalogues, articles, and reviews. Many of these art mediators cultivated friendly relationships with the artists they supported, collecting their work and commissioning portraits. The artists’ vivid portraits depict these proponents of Impressionism and Expressionism oscillating between two quite different roles, namely, as the cosmopolitan dandy and the visionary prophet. The portraits record these critics and theorists as intellectual partners on a shared path towards innovation.

Still Lifes

In 1900, it was a firm principle of modern aesthetics that ‘a beet painted well is better than a poorly painted Madonna’, to quote Max Liebermann. The hierarchy of genres was no longer irrefutable – the subject of a painting had become secondary. ‘A bunch of asparagus, a bouquet of roses – these sufficed for a masterpiece’. Thanks to and the Leibl school in , the still life took on a new significance: It became a place for artistic experimentation. In still lifes, artists addressed painterly questions of composition, colour, and technique. Perspective, light, surfaces, contrasts of colour and shape could be varied and methodically studied even more easily in the controlled environment of the studio than when painting en plein air or when working with a live . Artists selected familiar items such as apples, flowers, masks, or earthenware based on their forms and colours and positioned these objects in distinctive arrangements. The subject itself was less important than the act of painting; the still life became the ‘touchstone’ of the artist (Edouard Manet). Impressionism and Expressionism shared this idea, although each movement adapted the still life to its respective style. The Impressionists’ guiding light was Manet, while for the Expressionists it was Paul Cézanne, whom Julius Meier-Graefe dubbed the ‘father of ’.

Behind closed Doors

Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 play Intérieur instances the importance and relevance of the concept of the interior, which was experienced and staged as a protected, ‘holy’ alternative to public space. In the early modern industrial age, interior space was more important than ever before for people’s ideas of living and selfhood. Women, from whom the emancipation movement was still far off, were intimately acquainted with the indoor world.

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This is why Impressionists and Expressionists alike most often depicted women in their interior scenes: some preferred women engaging in domestic activities and personal tasks, while others mainly showed woman as nudes in a studio. Even models whom the painters knew personally remained largely formal subjects through whom artists might study the relationships between colour and form or between bodies and space. Renoir painted women, in his own words, as ‘beautiful fruit’, and as spatial still lifes. Degas and Kirchner sought to arrest movements that were natural and unfeigned, even commonplace. Fleeting ‘depictions of life’ (Lovis Corinth) were captured in these pictures, painted as if peeping through a ‘keyhole’ (Edgar Degas). Thus the most intimate (and most familiar) moments form the alluring, at times voyeuristic, subjects of both Impressionist and Expressionist interior paintings.

Animal

Given the strictures of bourgeois life, the desire to return to nature as a site of origin factors into the many representations of animals in Impressionism and Expressionism. The naturalness of these creatures appealed to artists. The animal was an unencumbered subject with no associated greater significance and it served as a proving ground for a new definition of art. ‘Intangible ideas express themselves in tangible forms,’ wrote August Macke, ‘made tangible through our senses as a star, as thunder, as a flower’ – or, one might add, as an animal. German Impressionists discovered animals wherever they looked – in the countryside, on the racecourse, in the zoo, and in cages – and were inspired by a hitherto underappreciated wealth of colours, shapes, and movements. These artists merged representations of animals with their environments. For Franz Marc, the animal was a being with a soul and even became a more general symbol of life. He wanted to paint ‘the animal’s own sense of experience’. From 1913, animals became a means for Marc, Nolde, and Dix to express diffuse yet tangible fears. Curt Herrmann, for example, painted a flamingo, which had recently died in a zoo, as an allegory for the war in 1917.

Premonitions of War. 1913

Even in the years before the First World War, Wilhelmine empire society was deeply divided, split between bureaucrats, nationalists, and social revolutionaries. Friedrich Nietzsche had critiqued the decline of European culture and morality, questioning his contemporaries’ belief in progress. Anthroposophy, mysticism, socialism, and depth psychology supplied alternative models for explaining society. A series of disasters – including the earthquake in Messina in 1908, the appearance of Halley’s comet in 1910, and the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 – made an apocalypse feel threateningly close at hand. The second Moroccan crisis in 1911 and the Balkan Wars in 1912/13 fuelled this simmering feeling of unease. This powerless sense that the ‘end of days’ (Georg Heym) had arrived was in constant conflict with a societal desire for revolution and renewal. The avant-garde flourished in this atmosphere. The ‘Neue Club‘ was founded in Berlin in 1909. At the club’s ‘Neopathetic Cabaret’, controversial author Frank Wedekind gave readings, as did and Franz Kafka, and Arnold Schönberg’s piano pieces were performed there as well. Georg Heym and Jakob van Hoddis forged their ominous visions into powerful figurative verse. And Expressionist painters created lasting images of the era’s lurking sense of uncertainty.

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