Art Essay, Research Paper

ART 2D TERM PAPER

German Expressionism and Surrealism

German Expressionism was a movement that rebelled against the tradition of Realism,

both in subject matter and style. It applied to an artistic movement that lead

German Avant-Garde painting of the early 20th Century rule. Expressionist painting,

which developed in reaction to the dormant academic standards of the previous century,

discarded refined pictorial naturalism in favor of direct emotional expression

characterized by bold distortions of form and violent color.

Surrealism is a term coined by The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 in

reference to his own writings, as well as the work of certain painters, such as Picasso and

Marc Chagall. In 1924, one of the founders, Andre Breton, revived the term in his

Manifesto of Surrealism, where he describes a super-reality connecting the dream

world and reality.

The movement is mostly concerned with the different aspects of the unconscious mind

and representations of the dream state.

Max Pechstein, an expressionist painter, born December 31, 1881, died June 29, 1955,

was a member of DIE BRUECKE (the bridge) A group of German expressionist

painters, active just before WWI, who reacted against the impressionism of the Secession

movement. Pechstein shared the bold color and expressionist distortion of the Bruecke

artists but in a less extreme and more decorative form than that practiced by the groups

leaders.

His painting called Zwiesprache (Two Voices) painted in 1920 is of two nude females

conversing in a landscape. It s condition is unusually fine, with strong, boldly-printed

colors. The sheet has only some soft creasing in the margins. The subject matter is most

probably sexuality and it incorporates the angular forms of Oceanic and African art.

The colors he has used in his woodcut are green, black, brown-beige and white. Color

becomes largely autonomous and takes on a key role within the composition. Through the

contrasts between complimentary colors Pechstein achieves exceptionally luminous

chromatic effects. Two Voices indicates an adept cutting technique where strokes are

deeply cut into the woodblock. His Woodcut resembles Picasso s les demioselles

d avigon , the nudes look like wooden figures but Pechstein s does not has fragments in

his figures compared to Picasso s. His Style can be characterized as linear,

rythmical expression, brilliant/vibrant color, simplification of form and harsher

outlines. These features aim at making a psychological rather than a descriptive

statement. The technique is exaggerated and distorted than the objective features of the

outside world. They embody violent extremes of mood and feeling.

The Function was that the artist saught to portray subjective emotions and responses to

the world around him rather than objective reality.

Joan Miro a spanish painter, whose surrealist works, with their subject matter drawn from

his realm of memory and imaginative fantasy, are some of the most original of the 20th

century. Joan Miro thought, painting was a way of life. Known for depriving himself of

sleep for days to have more time to paint the images of hallucinations creeping through

his head and on the walls of his studio, he produced abstract formations of real people

and animals as well as fantastic creatures and objects.

His Painting called Untitled a pochoir and collotype was painted in 1934. The

condition of this painting is pretty good. The colors remain bright, the only sign of aging

is the yellowness on the uncolored canvas, especially at the bottom. There is a line of

different tones that might have been spawn by time. The style of this painting can be

categorized in 3 stylistic divisions: Automatism, wherein Miro attempts to disengage

conscious control in the creative act; Veristic, in which the style is very realistic and

detailed although subject matter appears irrational, and Assemblage, in which unrelated

objects are juxtaposed in suggestion of an alternative reality. The painting, is an

object in an absurd situation, mixed with psychoanalytic thinking. It has no traditional

subject type. The painting is powerful because of the juxtaposition of the orange and

black colors, contrasted by the uncolored areas. It also is strong because because the

subject matter is elusive, meaning and function is unknown and the form is unrecognized.

The technique seems to start at the canvases with random washes and

then build upon the forms generated by sponges.

Surrealism has followed Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious and his ‘free

association’ technique for bypassing the conscious mind. In art it encompassed Andr

Masson’s automatic drawings, paintings based on emotive semi-abstract forms

and dreamlike images painted in a realistic style.

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Surrealism is also a response to the social strife. A state of such confusion is often

reached by those society believes to be crazy, so inherent in Surrealism is an adoration of

madness. If thought about in terms of the ideals of Surrealists this state of mind as an

ideal makes sense. Madness brought a different perspective, real hallucinations, and

poetic ideas: there is often a juxtaposition of obscure objects that a sane person would

never think of. There is much question of the sanity of many Surrealist artists, not

because of their work but due to their obsessions with suicide and bouts of depression.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Impressionist and Post-

impressionist paintings started to appear in German cities like Berlin, Dresden, and

Munich. Although Kirchner had reservations about the styles, two artists in the Br cke

group were enthralled by Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s work, Emil Nolde and Max

Pechstein. Max Pechstein wrote, “Van Gogh is the father of us all.” The German artist

Paula Modersohn-Becker (considered a forerunner to Expressionism) after viewing some

of Van Gogh’s paintings remarked, “I should like to endow color with fullness,

excitement” It would be the exaggerated use of color, animation, and

spiritual form that would inspire the Expressionists. Van Gogh and Gauguin’s use of

subjective colors was physiological, irresistibly fleeting, and swiftly vanishing. As Van

Gogh had stated about his work, “to exaggerate the essential and purposely leave the

obvious things vague,” and Gauguin expressed, “paint dreams and always remain on the

search for the absolute.” The influence of Van Gogh’s emphatic, impasto brush strokes

would be found in the later works Van Gogh had taken his work beyond globs of paint

applied to a canvas; he needed to reconcile his

inner- self with deep devotion. Also his preoccupation with death drove him to put life

and essence into his paintings through the use of color. Van Gogh wrote his brother Theo:

Instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more

arbitrarily in order to express myself more powerfully. Gauguin’s

work showed mankind existing undisturbed in his natural, primitive state.

Van Gogh used yellow (his favorite hue) and blue as his primary colors; these colors

would advance and vibrate from his canvas. Kandinsky used these primary

colors to transcend everyday visual communication. Brightened by the influence of light,

yellow became relaxed, hopeful, a guiding light while violet or gray dissipated into

darkness .

Surrealism was developed by the 20th-century literary and artistic movement. The

surrealist movement of visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World

Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which

before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but

Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement

represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the

“rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had

culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the

movement, the poet and critic Andr Breton, who published “The Surrealist Manifesto”

in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of

experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the

everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories

adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the

imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm,

which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. This movement

continues to flourish at all ends of the earth. Continued thought processes and

investigations into the mind produce today some of the best art ever seen.

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