EXPRESSIONISTS at the Tate Modern on the 21st May 2024

 

EXPRESSIONISTS

TATE MODERN

21^ST MAY 2024

 

Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin by Gabriele Muenter, 1909

Militarism and autocracy were the forces that bound 19^th century Bavaria together.  Bavaria was one of the largest of the German states, allied to Napoleon and later part of the south German confederacy defeated by Prussia in 1866.  Bavaria was now part of the 2^nd Reich of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, yet it maintained many distinct regional flavours.

The Dancer, Andrew Sacharoff by Marianne von Werefkin, 1909

King Ludwig I of Bavaria had attempted to liberalise Munich to attract artists, writers and musicians to its bohemia, the district of Schwabing.  His son continued the work by attracting the exiled composer Richard Wagner, for whom he provided the necessary funds for an opera house in the Franconian town of Bayreuth.  Wagner was relieved that he did not have to wear livery, for instance, one of a range of outdated regulations that stifled a free, creative spirit.

The Tiger by Franz Marc, 1912

Later, artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne Werefkin, and Alexei Jawlensky also arrived in Schwabing, escaping from the stultifyingly narrow Russian empire and its archaic, backward-looking traditions.  The German artists they met in Munich included August Macke, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Gabriele Muenter who was to become Kandinsky’s mistress even though he was married.  Although the Blue Rider artists represented a bohemia they were still bound to the conventions of the time, so when Kandinsky returned to Russia in 1914 he left Muenter behind and travelled with his wife.

Girl with Toddler by Maria Franck-Marc, 1913

This exhibition at the Tate Modern provides ample evidence of Muenter’s photographic skills including the photographs she took on trips to the USA and Tunisia.  These are skilful compositions given the level of technology she had at hand.  Claims that they undermine the conventions of pictorial Orientalism and explore feminist issues seem excessive especially given the skills demonstrated in her paintings.  Muenter was a primitive artist deploying thick black lines, thick paint plastered on and deficiencies of composition but for all that her work seems to fit with the Expressionist aesthetic.  Expressionism had its roots in primitivism and in an elemental rebellion against art convention. 

Deer in the Snow II by Franz Marc, 1912

The group known as the Blue Rider (Blau Reiter) evolved in Munich, capital of Bavaria, and grew out of the NKVM (New Artists Association of Munich) in 1909.  Eventually the group left the city for the town of Murnau where they established an artist’s colony which rescued artists like Klee and Jawlensky from isolation and obscurity.  Murnau is a town to the south of Munich, in the alpine district of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  The group not only painted but also went skiing together and walking in the alpine meadows and valleys.

Promenade by August Macke, 1913

They were also avid collectors of primitive and ethnographic art that supplied them with inspired themes and images.  Kandinsky’s art evolved from realism to impressionism.  In Schwabing he made the first abstract painting and pioneered the study of synaesthesia, the interpenetration of the senses, like understanding colour through sound.  Franz Marc began to develop in the direction of cubism, a style built up in regular geometrical shapes and assortments.  Paul Klee and August Macke were also gravitating towards cubism. 

Murnau - Johanisstrasse by Wassily Kandinsky

Their aesthetic concerns developed in tandem with a deepening spiritual sense that developed into Buddhism, Theosophy, and even Polytheism.  Franz Marc said in 1914, “Art was concerned with the most profound matters, that renewal must not be merely formal but a rebirth of thinking.”  Books like Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) and Ellen Key’s The Century of the Child (1900) foregrounded a new ‘great spiritual’ age and the potentialities of children, their naivety, profound spirituality and creativity which disregarded the rules and regulations of art.

Erma Bossi, Circus, 1909

The composer Arnold Schoenberg was also drawn to the group.  Schoenberg had begun to evolve a new kind of musical composition known as 12 tone or atonal, based on tones that diverge from western orthodoxy.  Both Kandinsky and Marc attended a concert of Schoenberg’s work in Munich on the 2^nd January 1911.  In 1912 Arnold Schoenberg said, “Kandinsky paints pictures in which the external object is hardly more to him than a stimulus to improvise in colour and form and to express himself as only the composer expressed himself previously.”  Music was central to the work of the Blue Rider since Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger were all accomplished performers and musicians and Thomas von Hartmann and Leonid Sabanejev were also musicians at the heart of the group’s work.  Eventually Schoenberg, a member of the musical avante garde would also begin to exhibit his paintings with the group.  In 1913 Kandinsky published a work called Sounds which investigated the connection between drama, words, colour, and music.

Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the table by Gabriele Muenter, 1912

The group was also fascinated by the scientific underpinnings of art, especially Goethe’s Theory of Colours, published in 1810.  This documented the psychological impact of different colours on mood and emotion.  Marc experimented with light refracting prisms to explore the nature of colour.  Marc used an achromatic doublet prism to explore compositions like Deer in the Snow II and a prism is also present in the exhibition to view Marc's original painting.

Marianne Werefkin, Self-portrait, c1910

The group ultimately dispersed at the outbreak of WW1.  Franz Marc served as a soldier on the western front as did Auguste Macke and Paul Klee.  Both Marc and Macke were killed in action.  In the 1930s the Nazis exhibited works by the group in their exhibition of Degenerate Art, a divisive event designed to whip up ethnic hatred and hostility to foreigners and women.  After WW2 the group emerged again and their work appeared in the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany.  Today the art of Blue Rider forms the core of Munich’s art collection in the Lenbachhaus in Konigsplatz, Munich.

Improvisation Deluge by Wassily Kandinsky, 1913

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, 21^st May 2024

Murnau farmer's wife with children by Gabriele Muenter, 1909