SESSION 13 Fauvism, Expressionism (figurative), New Objectivity (Monday 6th January & Tuesday 4th February) 1. Maurice Denis 2. Triple Portrait of Marthe 1892 Oil on canvas Musée Départemental, Paris (37 X45cm) 3. Andre Derain 3.1. Boats in the Port of Collioure 1905 Merzbacher Foundation 4. Maurice de Vlaminck 4.1. Restaurant de la Machine à Bougival 1905 Musée d'Orsay (60 X71 cm) 5. Matisse 5.1. Le Bonheur de Vivre 1905-6 Oil on canvas Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (176 X 240 cm) 6. Gustave Klimt 6.1. The Beethoven Frieze 1902 Secession Building, Vienna (approx. 30 metre) 7. Edvard Munch 7.1. The Storm, 1893, oil on canvas, MOMA (91.8 x 130.8 cm), 7.2. The Scream 1910, tempera on board (66 x 83 cm) The Munch Museum, Oslo 8. Otto DiX 8.1. The Skat Players 1920 Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, (87 X110 cm) 9. George Grotz 9.1. Daum marries her Pedantic Automaton 1920 Pencil, pen, brush and ink, watercolour and collage Berlin Landesmuseum fur Moderne Kunst (42 X 30 cm) 10. MaX Beckmann 10.1. The Night 1918-19 Oil on canvas, Dusseldorf (133 X 153 cm) For me, expressionism requires the image of reality to be distorted in form and colour in order to make it eXpressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas about it. Its roots lie in the work of the Symbolists and of Post-Impressionists such as Gauguin and Van Gogh. The colours are often strong and highly intense and often non-naturalistic and the brushwork is typically free and paint application tends to be generous and highly teXtured. In this session, I have pulled together some strands in painting that remain figurative, leaving aside for now the move towards pure abstraction. Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order. - Maurice Denis: 'Definition du neo-traditionism', Art et Critique, 1890. Maurice Denis wanted to symbolise the different aspects of his fiancé’s personality – a multiple portrait gave him the opportunity to do so. A deeply spiritual man, he wanted his paintings to reflect his beliefs. He was member of the Nabis and influenced by Gaugin,who said “How do you see this tree? It is green? Take your green then, the most beautiful green in your palette - and this shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.” I see artists like him as transitional figures. Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlamink and Henri Matisse were three friends determined to use colour in new evocative ways. Derain’s Boats in the Port of Collioure (1905) is typical of the pictures the two artists painted. Natural colours, perspective and realism were all dispensed with, to capture what Derain felt was the essential character of the port. Instead of a golden stretch of beach strewn with small boats, he paints the sand a flaming red to signal the burning heat of its surface. The fishing boats are rendered with rough dabs of blue or orange, the mountains dashed off with a couple of brushstrokes of pink and brown paint and the sea is made up of short stabs of dark blue and grey-green paint. The painting doesn’t just show you Collioure, it lets you feel the place. Maurice de Vlamink treated the street-scene in Restaurant de la Machine à Bougival in a similar fashion – perhaps turning the colour intensity up to maXimum. He said ‘transposed into an orchestration of pure colour every single thing I felt … I translated what I saw instinctively, without any method, and conveyed truth, not so much artistically as humanely. I squeezed and ruined tubes of aquamarine and vermilion.’. In the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Matisse insisted the work of the three was displayed in the same room; the influential art critic Louis VauXcelles said disparagingly that the paintings were the work of Les Fauves (wild beasts) Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre (Joy of Life) is a Fauvist take on a traditional pastoral scene full of hedonistic delights – lovemaking, music, dancing, sunbathing, flower-picking and relaXing – on a bright yellow beach dotted with orange and green trees. He references a print by Agostino Carracci (1557–1602) called Reciproco Amore, which depicts an almost identical scene. Matisse was one of a number of artists that benefited from the patronage of Gertrude and Leo Stein in the early years of 20th Century Paris. At the other end of Europe, the Vienna Secessionists were progressive artists who broke away from conservative academic art to bring fine arts and music together in a synthesis, or merging of the arts. One of their leaders, Austrian artist Gustav Klimt(1862 - 1918), was a painter interested in art's decorative qualities. Klimt's own work was intensely symbolic, personal, and erotic with eXtreme physicality. He painted the Beethoven Frieze as a background to a Secessionist eXhibition, using Richard Wagner's interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as an allegory of life to create a narrative of humanity in pictorial form. It shows humanity struggling against things like sickness, grief, hunger, and other negative forces to find eternal bliss in art. Edvard Munch was Norwegian but travelled widely and was influenced by the artists of Paris and Berlin. The Storm may have been influenced by a real event at Asgardstrand, but the spectral quality of the figures may indicate how nature is reflecting an inner turbulence of the mind. It is suggested that inside the lit-up building there is a wedding feast, giving the lonely woman in white walking towards the sea a special significance. Munch recalled that when he painted The Scream he had been out for a walk at sunset when suddenly the setting sunlight turned the clouds “a blood red" and he sensed an ‘infinite scream passing through nature'. Mundanely, it has been suggested the unnatural sky is the effect of a volcanic eruption, but I prefer that it is a psychological reaction by Munch to his sister’s commitment to a lunatic asylum. The artists grouped together of the Neue Sachlichkeit(“New Objectivity”) might be upset that I have included them with the expressionists – they had a contempt for the style. But for me, Otto Dix’s frustration at the treatment of maimed veterans after the Great War in The Skat Players is expressed better than words could ever do. The three players are horribly disfigured, and portrayed in the surreal style Dix often favoured; upon closer examination the viewer finds the cards and newspapers are real, and the blue jacket worn by one of the players is actual cloth. The wounded officers still proudly wear their medals, maybe only comfortable in the company of others like themselves. George Grosz in Daum marries her Pedantic Automaton ‘celebrates’ his marriage to Eva Peter with a devastating honesty. Grosz emphasized the cold, impersonal quality of the automaton with his use of collage. The anonymous - but oddly constructed background furthers the sense of alienation, a common theme in modernist art of the early-20th century. Max Beckman also eXperienced the horrors of the war, as a medical orderly. Beckman said he wanted The Night as a large modern history painting tinged with a sense of evil. Three men have invaded the room and are terrorising the occupants. This is an urban hell, an unfathomable and vile scene; one that reminds me of Goya’s horrors painted a century earlier. © Patrick Imrie 2020 .