Word: expressionistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...