Word: expressionist
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Rudely stated, German expressionism was the house style of radical figurative art in Northern Europe between about 1905 and 1930. But as Selz rightly insists in his catalogue essay, it was less a style than a cluster of attitudes. The major expressionist painters-Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Max Pechstein, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Lyonel Feininger-did have formal traits in common. Harsh, dissonant color that blared fitfully from an unrefined surface; jagged shapes, broken-bottle cubism, an appetite for the primitive in drawing; masklike faces, Gothic poses, extreme jumps of tone between limelight and gloom...
...People wonder why modern art is so large," Motherwell said, responding to the audience's awe at the size of his murals. "The obvious answer never seems to occur to them. Lofts in New York City, where so much of the Expressionist Movement grew, are 100 feet long by 20 feet wide. The artist's tendency is to fill up the environment...
Today, at 62, Motherwell is an American master (one of the very few around), but that is a recent reputation. Through the '40s and '50s in New York, when he was the youngest of the original abstract expressionist group, his conscious Francophilia set him rather apart from his colleagues. It was often taken as a denial of American newness. as a manifesto of eclecticism. Other artists dissimulated their debts to French painting or let critics bury them. Not Motherwell. Thus he was much abused as a mock European, all taste and private income-a Dick Diver, not attuned...
Another worthwhile exhibition in the area isat the Busch-Reisinger Museum on Kirkland St. This often-neglected Harvard art museum specializing in Germanic and Scandinavian Art currently is displaying the D. Thomas Bergen Collection of German Expressionist Drawings through July 15. Open 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. weekday, closed weekends...
...gestures of Expressionism are superfluous here; they encumber Grosz's stylistic ironies. The Expressionist style is no longer a progressive impulse, but a hindrance. Expressionism had transformed itself from a "movement" into a "school" whose rules had become obsolete. The selectivity of the Bergen collection makes it easy to carefully observe the development of Expressionism. These drawings are chronicles of individual and collective progress: a take-off, a jump, a landing at a new starting point...