THE BRIDGE
Die Brucke: Through a Glass Darkly
This morning very early in Garsing, a village at the edge of Munich, for an interview. The snow falling all around, so romantically.
Then a quick look at Die Brücke (The Bridge), a retrospective of the Expressionist fad with mostly Berlin artists - Nolde, Kirchener, but also Edvard Munch, a member of the movement in the early stages. Lots of great paintings but they become all too familiar after a while. It's a pity that the kind of self-criticism, primitive intensity, radicalism doesn´t surface anymore in German art which has gone all bourgeois and self-satisfied as summed up in the work of Gerhard Richter, practically an artist without a subject. In fact, the eye glides onto his expensive materials, the expensive frame, away from the actual content which might be Richter´s Uncle in German uniform, a mustang fighter plane, a seascape or really just anything. It doesn't matter, because there's nothing there. Only an empty horizon crowded with distant figures or vague coagulating shadows.
But the work of the Die Brücke artists is very distinct. They always break the holiest of holy art rules, never to frame the subject with a black line. The Die Brücke artists always use the moodiest, most intense black as a framing device. This lends the work its primitive aura, also the obvious borrowings but also deviation from, African art. At the time of the first popularity of Die Brücke, African art really stood for Primitive art, but that is no longer so. Or perhaps the time when non-European art was discovered and understood as merely relative to the Western discourse of art, perhaps that time has also gone and was itself a fashion. The anti-colonialism of the 50s and 60s breaking onto the neo-colonialism of our own era, when Europeans in khaki were replaced by Americans in khaki. This doesn´t disturb the rest of the Die Brücke artists who offer us a reminder of something, a mere memory of a short-lived but intense moment before the Great War.
For a time they epitomised Germany, but by this time had ceased to be Germans, or even Europeans. They had left Europe behind, all of them, because they could not cease breaking those rules that made them Germans or Europeans. What they had done was unthinkable, just as when Gauguin left Europe behind for the supposed island paradise of Tahiti.
They had indeed created a bridge between the old and new, between Europe and everyone else.
Paul Murphy, Munich
This morning very early in Garsing, a village at the edge of Munich, for an interview. The snow falling all around, so romantically.
Then a quick look at Die Brücke (The Bridge), a retrospective of the Expressionist fad with mostly Berlin artists - Nolde, Kirchener, but also Edvard Munch, a member of the movement in the early stages. Lots of great paintings but they become all too familiar after a while. It's a pity that the kind of self-criticism, primitive intensity, radicalism doesn´t surface anymore in German art which has gone all bourgeois and self-satisfied as summed up in the work of Gerhard Richter, practically an artist without a subject. In fact, the eye glides onto his expensive materials, the expensive frame, away from the actual content which might be Richter´s Uncle in German uniform, a mustang fighter plane, a seascape or really just anything. It doesn't matter, because there's nothing there. Only an empty horizon crowded with distant figures or vague coagulating shadows.
But the work of the Die Brücke artists is very distinct. They always break the holiest of holy art rules, never to frame the subject with a black line. The Die Brücke artists always use the moodiest, most intense black as a framing device. This lends the work its primitive aura, also the obvious borrowings but also deviation from, African art. At the time of the first popularity of Die Brücke, African art really stood for Primitive art, but that is no longer so. Or perhaps the time when non-European art was discovered and understood as merely relative to the Western discourse of art, perhaps that time has also gone and was itself a fashion. The anti-colonialism of the 50s and 60s breaking onto the neo-colonialism of our own era, when Europeans in khaki were replaced by Americans in khaki. This doesn´t disturb the rest of the Die Brücke artists who offer us a reminder of something, a mere memory of a short-lived but intense moment before the Great War.
For a time they epitomised Germany, but by this time had ceased to be Germans, or even Europeans. They had left Europe behind, all of them, because they could not cease breaking those rules that made them Germans or Europeans. What they had done was unthinkable, just as when Gauguin left Europe behind for the supposed island paradise of Tahiti.
They had indeed created a bridge between the old and new, between Europe and everyone else.
Paul Murphy, Munich
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