had far-reaching ramifications. It caused a rift between liberal and conservative members of the Verein that ultimately led to the foundation of the more progressive Berlin Secession. A decade later, Munch was to become a rich source of inspiration for Expressionist artists as they explored ways of giving form to subjective perception and emotional states, rather than mimesis and anecdote.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two of Germany’s most distinctive and original artists were women: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz had a long, prolific career that lasted from the 1890s until her death – just days before the end of the Second World War – well after Expressionism’s demise. Like Munch, her work often deals with profound emotion, birth, suffering and death. But it is otherwise very different. His work emerged from a Symbolist, bohemian milieu, pungent with sex and decadence on the one hand, and a highly personal, subjective sensitivity to the natural sublime on the other. Hers came from a Realist tradition of humane socio-political engagement and fundamental philanthropy. Kollwitz was primarily a graphic artist, making works on paper ranging from brief, gestural drawings to numerous versions of intricate etchings, finely tuned to the effects of subtle tonal variations.
Unlike Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker died young, before “Expressionism” even came into common parlance. Groups like the Brücke in their early phases knew little or nothing of her work. Emil Nolde met her in Paris in 1900, but this was before she had developed the style on which her posthumous reputation came to rest. Nonetheless, she is an interesting precursor of Expressionism.
As a woman artist, Modersohn-Becker was not admitted to the traditional Academy. She trained instead at a single-sex school in Berlin and then at the Colarossi Academy in Paris. Her work was greatly stimulated by her first-hand experience of art in the French capital, above all by Cézanne, Gauguin, Rodin and collections of Japanese art. However, her most powerful subject-matter was drawn from the German provincial countryside. She joined the established artists’ colony at Worpswede, a small village in the marshy, moorland landscape near Bremen in the north of Germany in 1898. In so doing, she was taking part in a growing tradition of creative retreats into the countryside. Other established artists’ colonies included Pont-Aven in France and St Ives in Britain. “Going away” appealed to artists in search of uncorrupted nature, colourful indigenous traditions and close-knit community.
Edvard Munch, The Kiss, 1897.
Oil on canvas, 99 x 80.5 cm.
Munch-museet, Oslo.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Trumpeting Girl, 1903. Oil on canvas.
Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstraße,
Paula Modersohn – Becker Museum, Bremen.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Old Woman in Garden, 1907. Oil on canvas.
Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstraße,
Paula Modersohn – Becker Museum, Bremen.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, After the Bath, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 84 x 95 cm.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden.
In short, what many were seeking was life untouched by the ruptures of capitalist modernity. In fact, such artists’ colonies were themselves products of the railway age, the tastes of urban art markets and modern, exoticising fantasies about the folk cultures of distant provinces. In the case of Modersohn-Becker, the landscape, local inhabitants and fellow artists at the Worpswede colony provided her with conditions in which she was able to develop a highly personal style. Her monumental portrait of an old woman from the local poorhouse is remarkable for the strong sense of design, semi-abstract forms, and the finely tuned evocation of the shadows and fading glow of the Northern twilight. Even more striking is the sense of powerful, dignified human presence with which she has endowed the old woman.
Modersohn-Becker was often ambivalent about the Worpswede life and felt a lack of stimulation there. She married another Worpswede artist, Otto Modersohn, but her antidote to the colony’s insularity was Paris (which she called the “world”). She was a sophisticated artist, but in her drive for directness and truthfulness, she avoided sentimentalising or romanticising her subjects. This is part of what distinguishes her work from that of artists who went into the countryside looking for subjects to match their own or their collectors’ received ideas of the countryside. She died in 1907, aged thirty-one, a few weeks after giving birth to a daughter.
Another member of the Worpswede colony and a close friend, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, dedicated a requiem, full of images of life and fertility, to her:
For you that understood: the heavy fruit.
You placed it there in front of you on platters
And balanced then its heaviness with colour.
And much like the fruit you also saw the woman,
And you saw children thus: intrinsically —
Driven into the forms of their existence…
The tension between cosmopolitan modernity and indigenous nature was an important political factor in debates around Germany’s artistic heritage and future. The concept of “German Art” was controversial before, during, and after the era of Expressionism. But it was an especially contested issue in Wilhelmine Germany – from unification in 1871 until the empire’s collapse in 1918.
At that time, discussion of modern art was often tied to concerns for German national identity. Julius Langbehn’s nationalist Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator), published in 1890, became an instant best-seller. Langbehn had no qualms about defining Rembrandt as German, who, along with Goethe and Luther, constituted the “culture” that would be “the true salvation of the Germans”. His book diagnosed contemporary Germany as a culture in decline, threatened on all sides by internationalism, science, democracy – in short, by modernity. The nationalist cant of anti-modernism was taken up in the following decades by, amongst others, Carl Vinnen, a conservative painter of landscapes, also from Worpswede. He published an inflammatory collection of texts, signed by 118 artists, under the title Ein Protest deutscher Künstler (A Protest of German Artists) in 1911. Vinnen had become embittered at the purchase by the museum in Bremen of an expensive landscape by Van Gogh. In spite of his Dutch roots, Van Gogh was equated with what Vinnen saw as the “great invasion of French art”. Furthermore, “French art” soon came to stand for modernism in general, including Expressionism.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with Camellia, 1906–1907.
Oil on wood, 61 x 30.5 cm.
Museum Folkwang, Essen.
An ardent defence, in the form of a published counter-statement Im Kampf um die Kunst (The Struggle for Art) was quickly mounted by the pro-modernist camp: progressive artists, writers and collectors. They included the art historian Wilhelm Worringer, members of the emerging Blaue Reiter circle and Max Beckmann. Although Expressionist art itself was often quite strikingly apolitical, this early conflict in its history highlighted the cultural-political dimension of the issue of Expressionism in the German context. This became especially clear in the 1930s when theorists on the Left debated retrospectively the successes and failures of Expressionism, and the campaign against modernism, internationalism and Expressionism re-ignited
