Word: expressionist
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...Thursday), British filmmaker Peter Watkins will introduce his documentary Edvard Munch. This is one of the most successful attempts ever made as cinematically depicting the life of an artist, with documentary as well as conventional narrative footage. The life and work of one of the twentieth century's greatest expressionist artists--unappreciated during his lifetime--takes three hours to cover, but they're highly stimulating, educational and visually rewarding. And it's free. Watkins is one of the cinema's most exciting young political filmmakers...
Ogni dipintore dipinge se, a Renaissance maxim ran: every painter paints himself. Steinberg's peculiar achievement has been to render this maxim, pruned of all expressionist content. What obsessively concerns him is the idea that each drawing remakes its author: it is a mask. The self-made artist is one of his favorite motifs, and certainly his most famous one: a little man grasping the pen that draws him. In this "self-portrait," artist and motif are fused, locked in a permanent logical impossibility that is also an ambition of poetry: Myself I will remake...
Steinberg's work is always signaling that there are more interesting matters in art than "authenticity" in the expressionist sense. It looks beyond the man to the mask and finds there an extraordinary variety of personae, by turns bland, urbane, comic, ridiculous and distinctly threatening. The first mask of all is style itself. "I want the minimum of performance in my work," says Steinberg, a virtuoso if ever there was one. "Performance bores me. What interests me is the invention. I like to make a parody of bravura. You have to think of a lot of my work as some...
...Nordic Middle Ages, with their unrelenting insistence on the "four last things"-death, judgment, heaven and hell-to any Mediterranean tradition. Egon Schiele's knobbly waifs, all etiolated limbs and pinched flesh, are the lineal descendants of the fallen Eves in Gothic art. The expressionist body is a scrag of mutton with big extremities, very unlike the prosperous Renaissance nudes that, however mutated, survived in Picasso and Matisse. Expressionism was an art of confession, directed against the impermeable crust of a deeply formalized society. It had few political ambitions-as German Dada did-but it did carry a strong...
...African carvings he parodied in Masks, 1911; three years later, bubbling with fantasies about noble savages, he went to Melanesia with a German expedition, and his ideas of the racial purity of primitive societies led him to an early membership in the Nazi Party. (The relationship between Nazism and expressionist painting was, as Selz discreetly suggests, a good deal less antagonistic than is usually supposed.) But if the cult of the primitive was one aspect of expressionism, the scrutiny of the far less familiar recesses of the psyche was another. Kokoschka's painting of the avant-garde architect Adolf...