German Expressionism: the Second Generation (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988): 10-37
Stephanie Barron, “Introduction” to Barron (ed.), German Expressionism: The Second Generation (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988): 10-37. The notion that all the significant achievements of German Expressionism occurred before 1914 is a familiar one. Until recently most scholars and almost all exhibitions of German Expressionist work have drawn the line with the 1913 dissolution of Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Berlin or the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Peter Selz’s pioneering study German Expressionist Painting, published in 1957, favored 1914 as a terminus as did Wolf-Dieter Dube’s Expressionism, which appeared in 1977. It is true that by 1914 personal differences had led the Brücke artists to dissolve their association, and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) had disintegrated when Wassily Kandinsky returned from Munich to Russia and Franz Marc volunteered for war service. Other artists’ associations also broke up when their members were drafted. Thus, the outbreak of the war has provided a convenient endpoint for many historians, who see the postwar artistic activities of Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Kathe Kollwitz, and others as individual, not group responses and describe the 1920s as the period of developments at the Bauhaus in Weimar or of the growing popularity of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). The years 1915-25 have been lost, or certainly not adequately defined, as a coherent and potent, albeit brief, idealistic period in the evolution of German Expressionism. More recent scholarship, including Dube’s Expressionists and Expressionism (1983) and Donald E. Gordon’s Expressionism- Art and Idea (1987), sees the movement as surviving into the 1920s.
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