Post-expressionism
Encyclopedia
Post-expressionism is a term coined by the German art critic
Franz Roh
to describe a variety of movements in the post-war art world which were influenced by expressionism
but defined themselves through rejecting its aesthetic. Roh first used the term in an essay in 1925, "Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism", to contrast to Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub's "New Objectivity
", which more narrowly characterized these developments within German art. Though Roh saw "post-expressionism" and "magic realism" as synonymous, later critics characterized distinctions between magic realism and other artists initially identified by Hartlaub and have also pointed out other artists in Europe who had different stylistic tendencies but were working within the same trend.
, much of the art world was under the influence of Futurism
and Expressionism
. Both movements abandoned any sense of order or commitment to objectivity or tradition.
The sentiment of Futurists was most vocally expressed by Filippo Marinetti
in the Futurist Manifesto
, where he called for a rejection of the past, a rejection of all imitation — of other artists or of the outside world — and praised the virtue of originality and triumph of technology. The Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, along these lines, said “After seeing electricity, I lost interest in nature.” Marinetti and other Futurists glorified war and violence as a way to revolution — bringing freedom, establishing new ideas, and rallying one to fight for ones own people — and as war was shaping up in Europe, many saw it and encouraged a way to “purify” the culture and destroy old, obsolete elements of society.
Expressionists, likewise abandoning imitation nature, sought to express emotional experience, but often centered their art around angst
— inner turmoil; whether in reaction to the modern world, to alienation from society, or in the creation of personal identity. In concert with this evocation of angst, expressionists also echoed some of the same feelings of revolution as did Futurists. This is evidenced by a 1919 anthology of expressionist poetry titled Menschheitsdämmerung, which translates to “Dawn of Humanity” — meant to suggest that humanity was in a 'twilight'; that there was an imminent demise of some old way of being and beneath it the urgings of a new dawning.
Both futurism and expressionism were always met by opposition, but the destruction that occurred in the war had heightened the criticism against them. Following the war, in and throughout different artistic circles there was a call for a return to order
and re-appreciation of tradition and of the natural world. In Italy, this was encouraged by the magazine Valori Plastici
and came together in the Novecento
, a group that exhibited in the Venice Biennale and was joined by many Futurists who had rejected their former work. Mario Sironi
, a member of this group, stated that they “would not imitate the world created by God but would be inspired by it.” The “New Objectivity” or Neue Sachlichkeit, as coined by Hartlaub, described the developments in Germany and became the title of an exhibition that he staged in 1925. Neue Sachlichkeit was influenced not only by the “return to order” but also a call to arms among more left-leaning artists who wanted to use their art in a forward, political manner that expressionism didn't enable them to do. In Belgium, there was another vein in the common trend, which would later be referred to as a “retour à l’humain”.
Although Roh originally meant the term 'Magic Realism' to be more or less synonymous with Neue Sachlichkeit, the artists identified by Hartlaub as 'classicists' later became associated with Roh's term. These 'Magic Realists' were all influenced by the classicism developed in Italy by the Novecento, and in turn by de Chirico's concept of metaphysical art
, which had also branched into surrealism. Art critic Wieland Schmeid in 1977 posited that despite the fact that the terms were meant to refer to the same thing, the understanding of them as different groups derives from the fact that the movement had a right and left wing, with the Magic Realists on the right — many later supporting fascism or accommodating to it— and the verists we associate as the Neue Sachlichkeit on the left — fighting against fascism. The two groups in addition to having different political philosophies likewise had different artistic philosophies.
The third movement that is important to include in post-expressionism, and which Roh excluded, is the reaction to Flemish expressionism, as opposed to strains of German expressionism and Italian futurism. This is typically referred to as animism.
In Italy, the style that Roh identified was created by a confluence of a renewed focus on harmony and technique called for by the “return to order” and metaphysical art, a style which had been developed by Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, two members of the Novecento. Carrà described his purpose as to explore the imagined inner life of familiar objects when represented out of their explanatory contexts: their solidity, their separateness in the space allotted to them, the secret dialogue that may take place between them.
The leading painter in Italy associated with this style is perhaps Antonio Donghi
, who kept to traditional subject matter — popular life, landscapes, and still life — but presented it with strong composition and spatial clarity to give it gravity and stillness. His still lifes often consist of a small vase of flowers, depicted with the disarming symmetry of naive art
. He also often painted birds carefully arranged for display in their cages, and dogs and other animals ready to perform for circus acts, to suggest an artificial arrangement placed on top of nature. In Germany, Anton Räderscheidt
followed a style similar to Donghi, turning to magic realism after abandoning constructivism. Georg Schrimpf
is somewhat like the two, working in a style influenced by primitivism
.
Filippo De Pisis
, who is often associated with metaphysical art, can also be seen as a magic realist. Like Donghi, he often painted traditional subjects, but rather than developing a strict classical style, used a more painterly brush to bring out the intimacy of the objects, similar to the Belgian animists. His association with metaphysical art comes from the fact that he would often contrapose objects in his still lifes, and set them in a scene that gave them context.
Another artist in Italy considered a magic realist
is Felice Casorati
, whose paintings are rendered with fine technique but often distinguished by unusual perspective effects and bold colorfulness. In 1925, Rafaello Giolli summarized the disconcerting aspects of Casorati's art — “The volumes have no weight in them, and the colors no body. Everything is fictitious: even the living lack all nervous vitality. The sun seems to be the moon ... nothing is fixed or definite.”
Other German artists who worked within this style are Alexander Kanoldt
and Carl Grossberg
. Kanoldt painted still lifes and portraits, while Grossberg painted urban landscapes and industrial sites rendered with chilly precision.
Bertold Brecht, a German dramatist, was an early critic of Expressionism, referring to it as constrained and superficial. Just like in politics Germany had a new parliament but lacked parliamentarians, he argued, in literature there was an expression of delight in ideas, but no new ideas, and in theater a 'will to drama', but no real drama. His early plays, Baal and Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) express repudations of fashionable interest in Expressionism. Opposed to the focus on individual emotional experience in expressionist art, Brecht began a collaborative method to play production, starting with his Man Equals Man
project.
Overall, the verist critique of expressionism was influenced by Dadaism. The early exponents of Dada had been drawn together in Switzerland, a neutral country in the war, and in common cause, they wanted to use their art as a form of moral and cultural protest — shaking off not only the constraints of nationality, but also of artistic language, in order to express political outrage and encourage political action. Expressionism, to Dadaists, expressed all of the angst and anxieties of society, but was helpless to do anything about it.
Out of this, Dada cultivated a “satirical hyperrealism”, as termed by Raoul Hausmann
, and of which the best known examples are the graphical works and photo-montages of John Heartfield
. Use of collage in these works became a compositional principle to blend reality and art, as if to suggest that to record the facts of reality was to go beyond the most simple appearances of things. This later developed into portraits and scenes by artists such as George Grosz
, Otto Dix
, and Rudolf Schlichter
. Portraits would give emphasis to particular features or objects that were seen as distinctive aspects of the person depicted. Satirical scenes often depicted a madness behind what was happening, depicting the participants as cartoon-like.
Other verist artists, like Christian Schad, depicted reality with a clinical precision, which suggested both an empirical detachment and intimate knowledge of the subject. Schad's paintings are characterized "an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin", according to Schmied. Often, psychological elements were introduced in his work, which suggested an underlying unconscious reality to life.
and Louis Pevernagie
who had combined expressionism with symbolism
. Ensor, known for his paintings of people in masks, carnival outfits, and side-by-side with skeletons, also often painted realistic scenes, but imbued them with a fevered brush, garish colors, and strong contrasts to suggest a strange unreality present in them, as did Pevernagie. Expressionism was also exhibited in the Latemse School, where adherents like Constant Permeke
and Hubert Malfait used brushwork in painting and loose form in sculpture to show a mystic reality behind nature.
In what had been called a “retour à l’humain” (return to the human), many artists working in Belgium after the war had kept the expressive brush of their forebearers, but had rejected what they had seen as the anti-human, unreal distortions in their subject matter. The goal was to use the expressive brush to depict the soul or spirit of the objects, people, and places they were painting, rather than a hyperbolic, externalized, displaced angst of the artist. These artists were often characterized as 'introverts', as opposed to the 'extroverts' of expressionism.
Belgian art critic Paul Haesaerts
later gave this movement the title animism, which he took from anthropologist E.B. Tylor
's book Primitive Culture (1871) describing 'animism
' as primitive religion that based itself on the idea a soul inhabited all objects. Later, Haesaerts, driven by criticism to do so, also used the terms réalisme poétique and intimism, although animism is still most commonly used in literature. Intimism will more often refer to the art practiced by some members of the Nabis
.
The most recognized painter of these artists is Henri-Victor Wolvens, who painted many scenes of the beach and ocean at Oostende. In his beach scenes, harsh waves are painted with a rough brush, clouds in patches — rougher when in storm — and the sand with a scraped quality. Figures are painted as simple of possible, often as stick figures, and given translucency and movement — so his bathers show the activity of the beach and it the activity of the bathers blend in with the motion of the waves crashing ashore.
The work of Floris Jespers
was strongly influenced by an animist spirit after the war. He uses form and color to give different degrees of vividness to the subjects in his paintings, each to the degree that one would associate them with in life.
Other painters associated with this movement are Anne Bonnet
, Albert Dasnoy, Henri Evenepoel
, Mayou Iserentant, Jacques Maes, Marcel Stobbaerts, Albert Van Dyck, Louis Van Lint
, War Van Overstraeten and Jozef Vinck.
Filippo De Pisis, referenced above, exhibited animist tendencies.
George Grard
is the sculptor most associated with animism. Like expressionists, he went against both naturalism and classical tendencies, but used exaggerations from his models to heighten the feeling and sensuality of the form, and chose lyrical subjects. Grard was friends with Charles LePlae, who had a similar style, but kept more in line with natural and classical forms.
Herman De Cuyper is also associated with animism, and abstracted to a more extreme degree than did Grard or LaPlae, and in some ways is more similar to Henry Moore
.
.
was a member of this group, and identified himself and others who who he met with as members of the “New Roman School of Painting”, or nuovi pittori romani (new Roman painters). Cagli spoke of a spreading sensitivity and an Astro di Roma (Roman Star) which guided them, affirming it as the poetic basis of their art:
Sometimes referred to as romantic expressionism, art from this group exhibits a wild painting style, expressive and disorderly, violent and with warm ochre and maroon tones. Contrary to early expressionism, the focus isn't on angst and turmoil, but rather seeing the world anew, as Cagli described, through romantic imagination. Yet, the formal rigour of the Novecento was replaced by a distinctly expressionist visionariness.
Scipione
brought to life a sort of Roman baroque expressionism, where often decadent landscapes appear of Rome's historical baroque centre, populated by priests and cardinals, seen with a vigorously expressive and hallucinated eye.
Mario Mafai
painted many scenes of Rome and its suburbs, and used warm chromatic colors to convey a sense of freshness and pictorial curiosity. This bent is particularly emphasised in his 1936-1939 work, in a series paintings entitled Demolitions, where in order to make a political statement he painted urban restructuring being carried out by the fascist regime. During the Second World War he painted a series of Fantasies depicting horrors committed by the fascists. Antonietta Raphaël
, Mafai's wife and a sculptor, was also a member of this group.
Another member was Renatto Guttuso, who like Mafai made paintings which denounced the fascist regime. Guttuso's works are generally bright, lively, and verging on abstraction.
Emanuele Cavalli
and Giuseppe Capogrossi have associations both with the Scuola Romana and with Magic Realism.
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
Franz Roh
Franz Roh
Franz Roh , was a German historian, photographer, and art critic.Roh was born in Apolda , Germany. He studied at universities in Leipzig, Berlin, and Basel. In 1920, he received his Ph. D...
to describe a variety of movements in the post-war art world which were influenced by expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
but defined themselves through rejecting its aesthetic. Roh first used the term in an essay in 1925, "Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism", to contrast to Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub's "New Objectivity
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
", which more narrowly characterized these developments within German art. Though Roh saw "post-expressionism" and "magic realism" as synonymous, later critics characterized distinctions between magic realism and other artists initially identified by Hartlaub and have also pointed out other artists in Europe who had different stylistic tendencies but were working within the same trend.
Background
Leading up to World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, much of the art world was under the influence of Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
and Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
. Both movements abandoned any sense of order or commitment to objectivity or tradition.
The sentiment of Futurists was most vocally expressed by Filippo Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement, and a fascist ideologue.-Childhood and adolescence:...
in the Futurist Manifesto
Futurist Manifesto
The Futurist Manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was published in the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909, then in French as "Manifeste du futurisme" in the newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909...
, where he called for a rejection of the past, a rejection of all imitation — of other artists or of the outside world — and praised the virtue of originality and triumph of technology. The Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, along these lines, said “After seeing electricity, I lost interest in nature.” Marinetti and other Futurists glorified war and violence as a way to revolution — bringing freedom, establishing new ideas, and rallying one to fight for ones own people — and as war was shaping up in Europe, many saw it and encouraged a way to “purify” the culture and destroy old, obsolete elements of society.
Expressionists, likewise abandoning imitation nature, sought to express emotional experience, but often centered their art around angst
Angst
Angst is an English, German, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch word for fear or anxiety . It is used in English to describe an intense feeling of apprehension, anxiety or inner turmoil...
— inner turmoil; whether in reaction to the modern world, to alienation from society, or in the creation of personal identity. In concert with this evocation of angst, expressionists also echoed some of the same feelings of revolution as did Futurists. This is evidenced by a 1919 anthology of expressionist poetry titled Menschheitsdämmerung, which translates to “Dawn of Humanity” — meant to suggest that humanity was in a 'twilight'; that there was an imminent demise of some old way of being and beneath it the urgings of a new dawning.
Both futurism and expressionism were always met by opposition, but the destruction that occurred in the war had heightened the criticism against them. Following the war, in and throughout different artistic circles there was a call for a return to order
Return to order
The return to order was a European art movement that followed the First World War, rejecting the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918 and taking its inspiration from traditional art instead. The movement was a reaction to the War...
and re-appreciation of tradition and of the natural world. In Italy, this was encouraged by the magazine Valori Plastici
Valori plastici
Valori plastici was an Italian magazine published in Rome in Italian and French from 1918 to 1922, edited by painter and art collector Mario Broglio and focused on aesthetic ideals and metaphysical artwork...
and came together in the Novecento
Novecento Italiano
Novecento Italiano was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 by Anselmo Bucci , Leonardo Dudreville , Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba , Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi...
, a group that exhibited in the Venice Biennale and was joined by many Futurists who had rejected their former work. Mario Sironi
Mario Sironi
Mario Sironi was an Italian modernist artist who was active as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer. His typically somber paintings are characterized by massive, immobile forms.-Biography:...
, a member of this group, stated that they “would not imitate the world created by God but would be inspired by it.” The “New Objectivity” or Neue Sachlichkeit, as coined by Hartlaub, described the developments in Germany and became the title of an exhibition that he staged in 1925. Neue Sachlichkeit was influenced not only by the “return to order” but also a call to arms among more left-leaning artists who wanted to use their art in a forward, political manner that expressionism didn't enable them to do. In Belgium, there was another vein in the common trend, which would later be referred to as a “retour à l’humain”.
Movements
When Hartlaub defined the idea of the Neue Sachlichkeit, he identified two groups: the verists, who “[tore] the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature,” and the classicists, who “[searched] more for the object of timeless ability to embody the external laws of existence in the artistic sphere.”Although Roh originally meant the term 'Magic Realism' to be more or less synonymous with Neue Sachlichkeit, the artists identified by Hartlaub as 'classicists' later became associated with Roh's term. These 'Magic Realists' were all influenced by the classicism developed in Italy by the Novecento, and in turn by de Chirico's concept of metaphysical art
Metaphysical art
Metaphysical art , style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The movement began with Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality...
, which had also branched into surrealism. Art critic Wieland Schmeid in 1977 posited that despite the fact that the terms were meant to refer to the same thing, the understanding of them as different groups derives from the fact that the movement had a right and left wing, with the Magic Realists on the right — many later supporting fascism or accommodating to it— and the verists we associate as the Neue Sachlichkeit on the left — fighting against fascism. The two groups in addition to having different political philosophies likewise had different artistic philosophies.
The third movement that is important to include in post-expressionism, and which Roh excluded, is the reaction to Flemish expressionism, as opposed to strains of German expressionism and Italian futurism. This is typically referred to as animism.
Magic Realism
'Magic Realism' for Roh, as a reaction to expressionism, meant to declare “[that] the autonomy of the objective world around us was once more to be enjoyed; the wonder of matter that could crystallize into objects was to be seen anew.” With the term, he was emphasizing the “magic” of the normal world as it presents itself to us — how, when we really look at everyday objects, they can appear strange and fantastic.In Italy, the style that Roh identified was created by a confluence of a renewed focus on harmony and technique called for by the “return to order” and metaphysical art, a style which had been developed by Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, two members of the Novecento. Carrà described his purpose as to explore the imagined inner life of familiar objects when represented out of their explanatory contexts: their solidity, their separateness in the space allotted to them, the secret dialogue that may take place between them.
The leading painter in Italy associated with this style is perhaps Antonio Donghi
Antonio Donghi
Antonio Donghi was an Italian painter of scenes of popular life, landscapes, and still life.-Biography:Born in Rome, he studied at the Instituto di Belle Arti...
, who kept to traditional subject matter — popular life, landscapes, and still life — but presented it with strong composition and spatial clarity to give it gravity and stillness. His still lifes often consist of a small vase of flowers, depicted with the disarming symmetry of naive art
Naïve art
Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique. While many naïve artists appear, from their works, to have little or no formal art training, this is often not true...
. He also often painted birds carefully arranged for display in their cages, and dogs and other animals ready to perform for circus acts, to suggest an artificial arrangement placed on top of nature. In Germany, Anton Räderscheidt
Anton Räderscheidt
Anton Räderscheidt was a German painter who was a leading figure of the New Objectivity.Räderscheidt was born in Cologne. His father was a schoolmaster who also wrote poetry. From 1910–1914, Räderscheidt studied at the Academy of Düsseldorf. He was severely wounded in the First World War, during...
followed a style similar to Donghi, turning to magic realism after abandoning constructivism. Georg Schrimpf
Georg Schrimpf
Georg Schrimpf , was a German painter and graphic artist. Along with Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad, Schrimpf is broadly acknowledged as a main representative of the art trend Neue Sachlichkeit , which developed in the 1920s as a counter-movement to Expressionism and Abstraction...
is somewhat like the two, working in a style influenced by primitivism
Primitivism
Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics...
.
Filippo De Pisis
Filippo De Pisis
Filippo De Pisis was an Italian painter.-Biography:Filippo de Pisis was an Italian painter-poet who was born Luigi Filippo Tibertelli in Ferrara....
, who is often associated with metaphysical art, can also be seen as a magic realist. Like Donghi, he often painted traditional subjects, but rather than developing a strict classical style, used a more painterly brush to bring out the intimacy of the objects, similar to the Belgian animists. His association with metaphysical art comes from the fact that he would often contrapose objects in his still lifes, and set them in a scene that gave them context.
Another artist in Italy considered a magic realist
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
is Felice Casorati
Felice Casorati
Felice Casorati was an Italian painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The paintings for which he is most noted include figure compositions, portraits and still lifes, which are often distinguished by unusual perspective effects.-Life and work:Casorati was born in Novara and showed an early interest in...
, whose paintings are rendered with fine technique but often distinguished by unusual perspective effects and bold colorfulness. In 1925, Rafaello Giolli summarized the disconcerting aspects of Casorati's art — “The volumes have no weight in them, and the colors no body. Everything is fictitious: even the living lack all nervous vitality. The sun seems to be the moon ... nothing is fixed or definite.”
Other German artists who worked within this style are Alexander Kanoldt
Alexander Kanoldt
Alexander Kanoldt was a German magic realist painter and one of the artists of the New Objectivity.Kanoldt was born in Karlsruhe. His father was the painter Edmond Kanoldt, a late practitioner of the Nazarene style...
and Carl Grossberg
Carl Grossberg
Carl Grossberg was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity movement.Grossberg was born in Elberfeld and studied architecture in Aachen and Darmstadt prior to his military service in World War I. He later studied at the Weimar Academy of Art and at the Bauhaus...
. Kanoldt painted still lifes and portraits, while Grossberg painted urban landscapes and industrial sites rendered with chilly precision.
New Objectivity and Verism
The artists most associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit today are those Hartlaub identified as 'verists'. These artists tended to oppose expressionism, but did not so much exemplify the “return to order” as much as they opposed what they saw as the political impotence of expressionist art. They sought to involve themselves into revolutionary politics and their form of realism distorted appearances to emphasize the ugly, as they wanted to expose what they considered the ugliness of reality. The art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical.Bertold Brecht, a German dramatist, was an early critic of Expressionism, referring to it as constrained and superficial. Just like in politics Germany had a new parliament but lacked parliamentarians, he argued, in literature there was an expression of delight in ideas, but no new ideas, and in theater a 'will to drama', but no real drama. His early plays, Baal and Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) express repudations of fashionable interest in Expressionism. Opposed to the focus on individual emotional experience in expressionist art, Brecht began a collaborative method to play production, starting with his Man Equals Man
Man Equals Man
Man Equals Man , or A Man's a Man, is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. One of Brecht's earlier works, it explores themes of war, human fungibility, and identity...
project.
Overall, the verist critique of expressionism was influenced by Dadaism. The early exponents of Dada had been drawn together in Switzerland, a neutral country in the war, and in common cause, they wanted to use their art as a form of moral and cultural protest — shaking off not only the constraints of nationality, but also of artistic language, in order to express political outrage and encourage political action. Expressionism, to Dadaists, expressed all of the angst and anxieties of society, but was helpless to do anything about it.
Out of this, Dada cultivated a “satirical hyperrealism”, as termed by Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.-Early biography:Raoul Hausmann was...
, and of which the best known examples are the graphical works and photo-montages of John Heartfield
John Heartfield
John Heartfield is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld...
. Use of collage in these works became a compositional principle to blend reality and art, as if to suggest that to record the facts of reality was to go beyond the most simple appearances of things. This later developed into portraits and scenes by artists such as George Grosz
George Grosz
Georg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...
, Otto Dix
Otto Dix
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...
, and Rudolf Schlichter
Rudolf Schlichter
Rudolf Schlichter was a German artist and one of the most important representatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement....
. Portraits would give emphasis to particular features or objects that were seen as distinctive aspects of the person depicted. Satirical scenes often depicted a madness behind what was happening, depicting the participants as cartoon-like.
Other verist artists, like Christian Schad, depicted reality with a clinical precision, which suggested both an empirical detachment and intimate knowledge of the subject. Schad's paintings are characterized "an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin", according to Schmied. Often, psychological elements were introduced in his work, which suggested an underlying unconscious reality to life.
Animism
In Belgium, expressionism had been influenced by artists like James EnsorJames Ensor
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Flemish-Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life...
and Louis Pevernagie
Louis Pevernagie
-Life:Louis Pevernagie was born in a village in Flanders at the beginning of the 20th century . He was the father of the painter Erik Pevernagie . The landscapes of the Flemish Ardennes were the inspiration for many of his paintings and gave an idea of Flemish farm life...
who had combined expressionism with symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
. Ensor, known for his paintings of people in masks, carnival outfits, and side-by-side with skeletons, also often painted realistic scenes, but imbued them with a fevered brush, garish colors, and strong contrasts to suggest a strange unreality present in them, as did Pevernagie. Expressionism was also exhibited in the Latemse School, where adherents like Constant Permeke
Constant Permeke
Constant Permeke was a Belgian painter and sculptor who is considered the leading figure of Flemish expressionism.Permeke was born in Antwerp but when he was six years old the family moved to Ostend, where his father became curator of the Municipal Museum of Arts. Permeke went to school in Bruges...
and Hubert Malfait used brushwork in painting and loose form in sculpture to show a mystic reality behind nature.
In what had been called a “retour à l’humain” (return to the human), many artists working in Belgium after the war had kept the expressive brush of their forebearers, but had rejected what they had seen as the anti-human, unreal distortions in their subject matter. The goal was to use the expressive brush to depict the soul or spirit of the objects, people, and places they were painting, rather than a hyperbolic, externalized, displaced angst of the artist. These artists were often characterized as 'introverts', as opposed to the 'extroverts' of expressionism.
Belgian art critic Paul Haesaerts
Paul Haesaerts
Paul Haesaerts was a multi talented Belgian artist.Born as Pauwel Helena Alfons Haesaerts, son of Benjamin Adolf Jan Baptist Haesaerts and Emma Philomena Spillemaeckers....
later gave this movement the title animism, which he took from anthropologist E.B. Tylor
Edward Burnett Tylor
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor , was an English anthropologist.Tylor is representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive Culture and Anthropology, he defined the context of the scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell...
's book Primitive Culture (1871) describing 'animism
Animism
Animism refers to the belief that non-human entities are spiritual beings, or at least embody some kind of life-principle....
' as primitive religion that based itself on the idea a soul inhabited all objects. Later, Haesaerts, driven by criticism to do so, also used the terms réalisme poétique and intimism, although animism is still most commonly used in literature. Intimism will more often refer to the art practiced by some members of the Nabis
Les Nabis
Les Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian in Paris in the...
.
The most recognized painter of these artists is Henri-Victor Wolvens, who painted many scenes of the beach and ocean at Oostende. In his beach scenes, harsh waves are painted with a rough brush, clouds in patches — rougher when in storm — and the sand with a scraped quality. Figures are painted as simple of possible, often as stick figures, and given translucency and movement — so his bathers show the activity of the beach and it the activity of the bathers blend in with the motion of the waves crashing ashore.
The work of Floris Jespers
Floris Jespers
Floris Jespers was a Belgian Avant-garde painter.After his graduation from the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts, he hooked up with the poet Paul Van Ostaijen and joined the Antwerp avant-garde movement of the 1920s...
was strongly influenced by an animist spirit after the war. He uses form and color to give different degrees of vividness to the subjects in his paintings, each to the degree that one would associate them with in life.
Other painters associated with this movement are Anne Bonnet
Anne Bonnet
Anne Bonnet was a Belgian painter.Born Anne Thonet in Brussels, she began her studies in art in 1924, but was obliged to abandon them in 1926 on the death of her parents. In 1930 she married Louis Bonnet, a dealer in silk, and her financial situation allowed her to return to art...
, Albert Dasnoy, Henri Evenepoel
Henri Evenepoel
Henri-Jacques-Edouard Evenepoel was a Belgian artist whose most important works are associated with Fauvism. He first studied art in Brussels at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts between 1889 and 1890, and entered Paris's Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1892...
, Mayou Iserentant, Jacques Maes, Marcel Stobbaerts, Albert Van Dyck, Louis Van Lint
Louis Van Lint
Louis Van Lint was a Belgian painter, major figure of the Belgian post-war abstraction.- Biography :Louis Van Lint studied painting at the Academy of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode under Henry Ottevaere and Jacques Maes until 1939...
, War Van Overstraeten and Jozef Vinck.
Filippo De Pisis, referenced above, exhibited animist tendencies.
George Grard
George Grard
George Grard was a Belgian sculptor, known above all for his representations of the female, in the manner of Pierre Renoir and Aristide Maillol, modelled in clay or plaster, and cast in bronze....
is the sculptor most associated with animism. Like expressionists, he went against both naturalism and classical tendencies, but used exaggerations from his models to heighten the feeling and sensuality of the form, and chose lyrical subjects. Grard was friends with Charles LePlae, who had a similar style, but kept more in line with natural and classical forms.
Herman De Cuyper is also associated with animism, and abstracted to a more extreme degree than did Grard or LaPlae, and in some ways is more similar to Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
.
Counter-movements
An early revolt against the imposed classicism that was popular in the Novecento took place with the founding of the Scuola RomanaScuola Romana
Scuola romana or Scuola di via Cavour was a 20th century art movement defined by a group of painters within Expressionism and active in Rome between 1928 and 1945, and with a second phase in the mid-1950s.-Birth of the Movement:...
.
Romantic Expressionism
Corrado CagliCorrado Cagli
Corrado Cagli was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage, who lived in the USA during World War II.Cagli was born in Ancona, but in 1915 moved with his family to Rome....
was a member of this group, and identified himself and others who who he met with as members of the “New Roman School of Painting”, or nuovi pittori romani (new Roman painters). Cagli spoke of a spreading sensitivity and an Astro di Roma (Roman Star) which guided them, affirming it as the poetic basis of their art:
Sometimes referred to as romantic expressionism, art from this group exhibits a wild painting style, expressive and disorderly, violent and with warm ochre and maroon tones. Contrary to early expressionism, the focus isn't on angst and turmoil, but rather seeing the world anew, as Cagli described, through romantic imagination. Yet, the formal rigour of the Novecento was replaced by a distinctly expressionist visionariness.
Scipione
Scipione
Scipione is an opera in three acts, with music composed by George Frideric Handel for the Royal Academy of Music in 1726. The librettist was Paolo Antonio Rolli. Handel composed Scipione whilst in the middle of writing Alessandro...
brought to life a sort of Roman baroque expressionism, where often decadent landscapes appear of Rome's historical baroque centre, populated by priests and cardinals, seen with a vigorously expressive and hallucinated eye.
Mario Mafai
Mario Mafai
Mario Mafai , was an Italian painter, founder with his wife Antonietta Raphaël of the modern art movement called Scuola Romana.- Biography :...
painted many scenes of Rome and its suburbs, and used warm chromatic colors to convey a sense of freshness and pictorial curiosity. This bent is particularly emphasised in his 1936-1939 work, in a series paintings entitled Demolitions, where in order to make a political statement he painted urban restructuring being carried out by the fascist regime. During the Second World War he painted a series of Fantasies depicting horrors committed by the fascists. Antonietta Raphaël
Antonietta Raphael
Antonietta Raphaël , was an Italian sculptor and painter of Jewish heritage and Lithuanian birth, who founded the Scuola Romana movement together with her husband Mario Mafai. She was an artist characterised by a profound anti-academic conviction, also affirmed by her sculptures which, especially...
, Mafai's wife and a sculptor, was also a member of this group.
Another member was Renatto Guttuso, who like Mafai made paintings which denounced the fascist regime. Guttuso's works are generally bright, lively, and verging on abstraction.
Emanuele Cavalli
Emanuele Cavalli
Emanuele Cavalli , was an Italian painter belonging to the modern movement of the Scuola romana . He was also a renowned photographer, who experimented with new techniques since the 1930s.-Biography:...
and Giuseppe Capogrossi have associations both with the Scuola Romana and with Magic Realism.