Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau Post-Impressionism took a different course in Germany. Revolt was apparent there from the opening of the century, and took on the aspects of a group movement at almost exactly the same time that the Cubists and the Fauves were making their first pioneering experiments. Like French post-Impressionism, German Expressionism in its various manifestations, from 1905, represented a revolt against the false conventions of a deteriorated painting and sculpture that survived out of Renaissance practice; but it was also, and even more specifically and more consciously, a revolt against the coldly scientific exercises toward which the larger part of French art had inclined under Impressionism. Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh were seen to have effected a break in the continuity of European cosmopolitan art. In Van Gogh especially, the Germans found a kind of art to which they responded intensely, and through which they were able to develop stylistic conventions in keeping with their north-country racial temperament and their national tradition. Van Gogh was a Dutchman. Edvard Munch (born 1853) was a Scandinavian by birth and a cosmopolitan in education. He was the strongest immediate influence upon the new twentieth-century Gerroans. He had devised a style of force and simplicity, influenced by the work of nineteenth-century Germans, notably Leibl and Liebermann, but intensely individual. His Girls on the Bridge ( 1889) is a nonnaturalistic and decorative study, making use of intense juxtaposed colors and incisive line, and is as modern in today's meaning as a painting by Gauguin or Van Gogh, of the same period. He must have remembered Van Gogh's passionate cry, "I want to paint humanity, humanity, and again humanity!" when he produced The Cry. This picture is the symbolic embodiment of a moment of anguish. Nikolaus Pevsner recently described its design as a visible wave of sound issuing from a crying mouth in an almost faceless figure that might be male or female, creating a path of suspended motion through the scene. Like the most characteristic work of the German Expressionists, it sought to intensify emotional meaning and illuminate and objectify psychological truths. The experimental group, Die Brücke ("The Bridge"), active in Germany from 1905, was formed by three men, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Erich Heckel, under the direct influence of Munch. Kirchner is credited with having been the first to study the African and Polynesian exhibits in the ethnological museum in Munich and to reflect in his own work some of the naïve mannerisms found there. Franz Marc, Heinrich Campendonk, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Mueller, and H. M. Pechstein were among the most prominent names in German Expressionism. Verism, or Die neue Sachlichkeit, represented a phase of postwar disillusionment in German art, corresponding, in the terms of another country and people, with the now all but forgotten Dada movement in France and Superrealism, which succeeded it. George Grosz, whose name is conspicuously associated with Verism, described his monstrous caricatures of Church, State, and Society, and of his fellow-creatures in general as a "holding up of the mirror to the face of hideous reality." C. J. Bulliet said in 1930 that Grosz's best work could never be shown in this country because of its bold obscenities. The Chicago critic's statement is interesting in view of the fact that this is the same George Grosz who came to America in the early thirties to become a citizen and a teacher and to find in America a new vein of Van Gogh inspired painting. Vasily Kandinsky (born 1866) stands alone as the creator of a theory of "visual symphonic music," an art of abstract line and color organized under the drive of emotional vision and complicated by an esoteric philosophy. He was credited by critics of different countries with having given rise to the term Expressionism, bestowed, in the same sort of vitriolic baptism as had christened the Cubists and the Fauves, by those who understood that the artist was attempting to give a portrait of his immortal soul in what appeared to them nothing but scratches and blotches. From 1900, Kandinsky worked in the direction of abstraction. By 1911, he had arrived at a nonfigurative expression. In 1912, he organized the Blaue Reiler ("Blue Knights") group, of which Paul Klee, the Swiss, was a conspicuous product. In 1937, Kandinsky, now living in Paris, was accepted as the master of a new nonobjective art organization in America, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Cézanne gave to modern art its conception of architectonic form. To painting, that with Impressionism had reached its final limitations as an exercise in visual analysis, he restored, it now appears, the internal construction which makes it (as he had falteringly undertaken to do) "something solid like the work of the Old Masters," something "for the museums." He discarded the device of aerial perspective, re-presenting three-dimensional space, and distance, by the separation of his planes, as in the landscapes. By concentration upon the scene, he finally abstracted its essential elements, realizing them in his picture by primary reliance upon color, used structurally with an intuitive understanding of its advancing and recessive values. (The tree in one of the water colors confronts the spectator, the figure on the road is at almost invisible distance--relationships established through the simple manipulation of color planes in discontinuous space. The ordering of the elements into an architectonic unity, complete in itself, corresponds not with the visual aspects of the scene but with its reality in the mind of Cézanne. This is the reality that modern art seeks.) Van Gogh was the restorer to our art of faith in the power of personal vision. Life and humanity are art's permanent subjects, and it was upon these that he concentrated his fiery energies, as men had done in the Middle Ages when as mystics and artists they sought to "look into the life of things and see naught else." Gaugin brought back the formal values of that design. From Byzantine mosaics, from medieval stained glass, and from the abstract ornament of aboriginal people, from every revolutionary source that his perverse fancy suggested, he borrowed for his decorative lineal paintings with their heavily outlined figures and objects. Gustave Moreau, a contemporary of Cézanne and a teacher of Matisse, is credited with having turned the attention of a generation to "the Old Masters" and the museums. The Gothic painters and the Sienese primitives had been rediscovered by Gaugnin and others. The abstraction in El Greco's work, the true significance of Oriental art, came to attention. The German Expressionists borrowed distortion and the heightened emotional intensities from the sculptured saints and the demons of Northern Europe's medieval religious buildings. The Germans, also, first scrutinized in ethnological museums the idols and fetiches of savages, borrowing from them their barbaric exoticism, while Picasso, notably, went deeper and demonstrated his absorption of the aesthetic significance of their expressive powers, and the French Cubists on the analogy of savage art arrived at a new appreciation of "modern primitives" as exemplified by Henri Rousseau. Cave paintings of European prehistoric times, at Altamira and in the department of Dordogne; tomb sculptures in cities unearthed near the legendary Garden of Eden, where they had been buried for centuries before Babylon and Assyria; the temples and gods of Yucatan: these important archaeological discoveries of the century have all become subjects of modern art's continuing research in the sources of its tradition. One of the results of this research has been to give the Western world, educated in the "classical" ideals of Greco-Homan civilization, a new and longer perspective on the origins of its art. The abstract and nonnaturalistic character of new painting and sculpture since Cézanne proves to have antecedents in many pasts.