Tag: expressionism

Christian Rohlfs

Christian Rohlfs, “The Village”, Oil on Canvas, 1913

Christian Rohlfs was born in Gross Niendorf, Kreis Segeberg in Prussia. He took up painting as a teenager while convalescing from an infection that was eventually to lead to the amputation of a leg in 1874. He began his formal artistic education in Berlin, before transferring, in 1870, to the Weimar Academy.

Initially Rohlfs painted large-scale landscapes, working through a variety of academic, naturalist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist styles. In 1901 he left Weimar for Hagen, where the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus had offered him a studio in the modern art museum he was setting up there. Meetings with Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde and the experience of seeing the works of Vincent van Gogh inspired him to move towards the expressionist style, in which he would work for the rest of his career.

Lyonel Feininger

Artwork by Lyonel Feininger

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States. 

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012. 

Top Insert Image: Andreas Feininger, “Lyonel Feininger”, 1928, Gelatin Silver Print on Board, 34.4 x 25.6 cm, Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Lyonel Feininger, “Gaberndorf II”, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 100.2 x 78.1 cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri 

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky, “Arabs (Cemetery)”, Oil on Cardboard, 1909, 28 x 39 Inches, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany

“Arabs (Cemetery)” was created by Wassily Kandinsky in 1909 and represents the artist’s experimentation with Expressionist concepts. The painting is oil on cardboard and is part of the modern art collection at the Hamburger Kunsthalle art museum in Germany.

It is among Kandinsky’s earlier works which do not yet incorporate the more severe angular forms of his later compositions. However, within this painting we witness Kandinsky’s move toward more geometric form and linear planes. The orange, green and blue hues of “Arabs (Cemetery)” emanate a tranquil feel. However, the blues contrast notably with the green and orange giving this oil painting a cool edge.

Expressionism was a volatile approach to art simply because it was relative and personal to the artist. Kandinsky, along with Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter, was one of the theoretical centers of the Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Riders), one of the pioneering movements of German Expressionism. Though Der Blaue Reiter had no official manifesto, Kandinsky’s treatise “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” of 1910 laid out several of its guiding principles. This treatise crystallized the group’s pursuit of non-objective or abstract painting and was widely read in avant-garde artistic circles across Europe and beyond.

Willem de Kooning

Four Paintings by Willem de Kooning

De Kooning strongly opposed the restrictions imposed by naming movements. While generally considered to be an Abstract Expressionist, he never fully abandoned the depiction of the human figure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, de Kooning became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling and distorting his figures in the process.

Although known for continually reworking his canvases, de Kooning often left them with a sense of dynamic incompletion, as if the forms were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into definition. In this sense his paintings exemplify ‘action painting’ – they are like records of a violent encounter, rather than finished works in the old Beaux Arts tradition of fine painting.

Although de Kooning came to embody the popular image of the macho, hard-drinking artist, – de Kooning approached his art with careful thought and was considered one of the most knowledgeable among the artists associated with the New York School. Willem de Kooning is thought to have possessed the greatest facility and polished techniques of painters in the New York School, one that compares to that of Old Masters, and he looked to the likes of Ingres, Rubens and Rembrandt for inspiration.

Ang Kiukok

Paintings by Ang Kiukok

Born in March of 1931 in Davao City Philippine Islands, Ang Kiukok was a painter known for his expressive, Cubist works. He often chose dynamic or disturbing subject matters, which frequently depicting rabid dogs, crucifixions, and screaming figures in an abstracted geometric style. Ang’s work gained both critical and commercial success in the Philippines throughout the 1960s.

Ang’s initial training began at an early age, when he was taught by a local commercial artist the art of charcoal drawing. After his family’s move to Manila, he attended the University of Santo Tomas from 1952 to 1954, where he studied under Filipino cubist painter Vincente Manansala. Ang’s first formal recognition of his work occurred in 1953 when his “Calesa” achieved third prize at the Shell National Students Art Competition. With encouragement from Manansala, he had his first solo show at Manila’s Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1954. Subsequent shows earned Ang many awards from the Art Association of the Philippines. 

Ang Kiukok gained national prominence in the 1960s with his distinctive style which fused aspects of cubism, surrealism, and expressionism.  His work favored subjects as rabid dogs, fighting cocks, and figures either bound in chains or experiencing great rage. Although Ang did not have a reputation as a critic of the Ferdinand Marcos government, the most violent and gruesome images were painted during Marcos’s reign of martial law. 

Ang Kiukok was given the honor of being a National Artist for Visual Arts in 2001, by vitue of Presidential Proclamation No. 32, which was signed on April 20 of 2001 by President Gloria Arroyo. By the end of his life, Ang was not only a critical success but also a commercially popular one. He died in Quezon City, Philippines, in May of 2001 at the age of seventy-four.

Top Insert Image: George Garçon, “Ang Kiukok”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ang Kiukok, “Fisherman”, 1981, Oil on Canvas, 88 x 101 cm, Private Collection

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “The Key”, Oil on Linen, 1946, 150 x 208 cm., Art Institute of Chicago

“The Key” belongs to Jackson Pollock’s ‘Accabonac Creek’ series, named for a stream near the East Hampton property that he and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, purchased in late 1945. Marking a crucial moment in his evolution as an artist, this quasi-Surrealist painting was created on the floor of an upstairs bedroom and worked on directly from all sides.

Although there is a general suggestion of landscape, here the process of painting became primary, expressing the power of spontaneous action and chance effects. The resulting abstraction, with its expressive, gestural appearance, prefigured the all-over compositions of Pollock’s celebrated drip paintings, which debuted the following year.

Roberto Matta

 

Paintings and Pastels by Roberto Matta

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (November 11, 1911 – November 23, 2002), better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile’s best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.

Matta’s travels in Europe and the USA led him to meet artists such as Arshile Gorky, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, and Le Corbusier. It was Breton who provided the major spur to the Chilean’s direction in art, encouraging his work and introducing him to the leading members of the Paris Surrealist movement. Matta produced illustrations and articles for Surrealist journals such as Minotaure. During this period he was introduced to the work of many prominent contemporary European artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee, “Wald Bau (Forest Construction)”, 1919, Mixed Media Chalk, 27 x 25 cm

Though Paul Klee was affiliated with the German expressionists, his work defies categorization. Ever experimental, he employed a variety of materials and styles throughout his career. In 1921 he began teaching at the Bauhaus. Klee’s collected lectures were published as “Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre)”, today considered one of the most important teaching texts in the history of modern art.

In this abstract painting entitled “Wald Bau, Forest Construction,” there are references to an evergreen forest intermingled with gridded elements suggestive of walls and paths. The painting mixes symbolic primitive drawing with a representational use of color.

Egon Schiele

Works by Egon Schiele

Born on June 12 of 1890, Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter and a  protégé of Gustav Klimt. Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century, noted for the intensity and the raw sexuality of his work.He produced many self-portraits, of which many were naked self-portraits.  The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele’s paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism.

Anton Kolig

Figurative Paintings by Anton Kolig

Anton Kolig, an important artist in Austria during the 1900s, spent considerable time with Sebastian Isepp, Franz Wiegele and Anton Mahringer in Nötsch in Carinthia. They formed an Austrian artistic movement within the first half of the 20th century called the “Nötscher Kreis (Circle of Nötsch)”. This movement with its strong Expressionist style decisively shaped the artwork in Austria .

Anton Kolig did many male nudes as well as still lifes and portraits. He preferred monumental paintings and admired Michelangelo, Hans von Marées and Lovis Corinth. Some of his paintings are reflections of his personal religious sense.

During a bombardment in in 1944 two-thirds of his works were destroyed. Anton Kolig is represented in the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, in the Military History Museum and in the Leopold Collection as well as in the Collection Essl and in the Art Gallery of Carinthia.