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German expressionism has rarely gone out of fashion since its emergence in the early years of the 20th century, but something about it feels particularly of the moment today. Perhaps that’s not so surprising for a movement that sought to define, graphically represent and challenge a time fraught with the threat of war, economic uncertainty and cultural conflict that often shaded into misogyny.
A large exhibition of work by the Blue Rider group occupied Tate Modern in London for much of last year and is now followed by a more focused show at the Courtauld Gallery. With Graphic Intent seeks to examine expressionism’s engagement with some of these heightened themes through one characteristic aspect of activity. “Their work on paper was central to the project,” says Niccola Shearman who, along with co-curator Emily Christensen, has brought together work from the Courtauld’s own collection and some prestigious loans. “Whether through pencil drawing or ink brush, work in colour or monochrome, woodcuts and prints, there is a visceral immediacy that matches the subject matter.”
In a break with established practice, these works on paper weren’t intended as preliminary sketches or mass-market alternatives to “fine art”; they were designed as completed artworks fit to match the task in hand. “You can see the sense of attack in pencil marks indenting the paper or in the jaggedness of woodcuts,” Christensen explains. “Expressionism brought the artist’s own emotional sensibilities, physically as well as by representation, directly into the art. The broken surfaces and jagged forms came from within to show what was outside.”
The works on show run from Austrian artist and playwright Oskar Kokoschka’s subversively sexual fairytale lithographs and illustrations from before the first world war up to a disturbingly grotesque distortion of a female form by Georg Baselitz in 1966, demonstrating the lingering potency of expressionist subjects and approach. Along the way are works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others, all wrestling with both the artistic world as much as the material and political worlds in which they lived.
“The subject of the battle of the sexes, as it was called, continually returns,” says Shearman. “At a time of expanding female emancipation, the worlds of art and culture – in line with wider politics and society – developed something of an obsession with sex and gender. And it was no coincidence that this sense of insecure masculinity accompanied more general societal fragility up to and including the collapse of empires.”
While it is unlikely that Kokoschka had read Freud when he began his career, operating in Vienna cafe society at the same time meant he was certainly subject to similar ideas. And though expressionism was a radical and progressive force in many ways, it also embodied the misogyny of its time and place and history, an era in which the writer Karl Kraus, influential on Kokoschka and others, could claim that an “effeminate” society was a sign of cultural degeneracy and bemoan his assessment of a living through a “vaginal era”.
But from this maelstrom of contradictions, with radicalism and new thinking still inexorably linked to tradition and conventions, came an approach to art and life that explicitly sought to make the world a better and fairer place in the face of seemingly overwhelming catastrophes. “A simple thing like artwork on paper was part of this,” says Shearman. “It was cheap, easily produced and accessible to a large public. It challenged class and art historical hierarchies. And it allowed for bold and emotionally direct statements. It was the art of the moment and still fulfils its function of provoking a sense of immediacy in all who see it.”
With Graphic Intent is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, to 22 June.
Jagged edge: five works from the exhibition
The Dreaming Youths, 1907, Oskar Kokoschka
Commissioned to produce a fairytale book for the children of a wealthy patron, Kokoschka subverted the genre and presented a darkly violent autobiographical saga of sexual awakening. The story culminates with the young lovers as pale and attenuated figures isolated from the lush garden paradise around them. The book was a succès de scandale and helped launch his career.
Children and Crows, 1932, Paul Klee
This playful scene of children and birds in a tangle of angular graphic codes captures how the expressionists saw youth as a pure state, untainted by modern society’s materialistic values. It also echoes Klee’s influential art teaching philosophy that students should attempt to throw off conventional learning and bring to their art a naive eye and a sense of fun.
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Drawing for Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women) from Der Sturm, 1910 Oskar Kokoschka
Kokoschka’s scandalous play about the battle of the sexes, using characters from classical Greek mythology, was largely made up of grunts and screams as he distilled Freud’s death or sex drive into violent drama.
Untitled, from the Whip Woman series, 1964, Georg Baselitz
After the second world war and the partition of Germany, Baselitz revisited expressionist social and sexual anxieties as revealed through the female form. This was a statement that rendered the notion of idealising the body untenable.
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, from the portfolio Nine Woodcuts, 1918, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Woodcuts appealed to the expressionists as organic structures that could be directly transferred to printed paper in a way that looked to the past as well as the future. Here, Schmidt-Rottluff employs traditional African masks and Christian imagery in an attempt to simplify life immediately after the untold technological horrors of the first world war.
