declaiming loudly from Zarathustra, without a collar and tie, came up my steps and introduced himself as Erich Heckel”.
Max Pechstein, On the Banks of the Lake, 1910.
Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm.
Private collection.
Of all the literary and philosophical sources that were formative for the way Expressionism developed, it was Nietzsche’s writings and Nietzschean ideas that exerted the most seductive appeal. It has been argued that apart from Karl Marx, no other nineteenth-century German thinker has had a greater influence on the development of German thought (and Nietzsche’s works were hungrily devoured by many non-Germans too). Among the ideas that proved most alluring for artists were his diagnoses of the decadence of contemporary culture and his exaltation of creativity as a force pregnant with the potential for vital salvation. He championed instinct over morality. His writings proffered the idea that there were superior men of action who could rise above the crowd. His vitalism and ecstatic “Dionysian” affirmation of life, which embraced extremes of both joy and pain, fuelled Expressionism’s passion, while his damning indictment of conventional morality urged on its rebellion. The Expressionist artists and poets were working at a time when the “Nietzsche cult” was at its height. Popular representations of the philosopher reached outlandish heights (literally!) such as in an image from 1915 of a muscular, heroically idealised Nietzsche atop a Zarathustran mountain range. In 1950, Gottfried Benn, who had been one of the foremost poets of the Expressionist period, reflected:
“Actually, everything that my generation discussed, dissected in its deepest thoughts – one can say suffered through; one can say: enlarged upon – all of that had been already expressed and explored, had already found its definitive formulation in Nietzsche; everything after that was exegesis. His treacherous, tempestuous, lightning manner, his feverish diction, his rejection of all idylls and all general principles, his postulation of a psychology of instinctual behaviour as a dialectic – ‘knowledge as affect,’ all of psychoanalysis and Existentialism. They were all his achievements. As is becoming increasingly clear, he is the great giant of the post-Goethean era”.
When the young Paul Klee arrived in Munich in 1899, he noted in his diary “Nietzsche in the air. Glorification of the self and the instincts. Boundless sexual drives”.
Munich was the other major site of pre-war Expressionism’s flourishing. There, in the old capital of German art nouveau or Jugendstil, other shifting constellations of artists were working, exhibiting and exchanging ideas together in the rich cultural environment of the city, or to be precise, its famous bohemian artists’ quarter, Schwabing. Wassily Kandinsky gave a vivid picture of the district’s pre-war milieu: “The rather odd, quite eccentric and self-assured Schwabing, in whose streets anyone – be they a man or a woman… immediately stood out if they were without a palette, or a canvas, or at least without a portfolio… Everyone painted… or wrote poetry, or made music, or began to dance. You could find at least two ateliers under the roof in every house, where sometimes not exactly very much was painted, but a lot was always debated, disputed, philosophised and conscientiously drunk (which depended more on the state of one’s purse than on the state of one’s morals)”.
Kandinsky tells a story, probably well-worn, that is revealing not only of Munich’s artists’ quarter, but of a whole dimension of the bohemian creed of “living” art: “What is Schwabing?” asks a Berliner visiting Munich. “It’s the northern district of the city” the local replies. “No way”, says another, “it’s a mental state”.
There were many Russians, like Alexander Sakharov, captured in an extraordinary portrait by his friend Alexei von Jawlensky. The dancer visited the painter one evening before a performance, already made up and in costume, which created a particularly androgynous effect. Quickly and spontaneously – reportedly in less than half an hour – Jawlensky produced this free, vigorous and highly memorable image.
At thirty, Kandinsky was a Russian who found himself in this milieu after leaving a promising career as an academic lawyer in Moscow. He headed for the artistic life in Munich in 1896, and quickly graduated from art student with the painter Franz von Stuck, to an important figure in the Munich avant-garde. He was a co-founder and president of the “Phalanx” school and exhibiting group (1901–1904) and of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists; Association of Munich) or NKVM in 1909. Through these activities he established a reputation as an effective organiser, and worked and exhibited together with many other Russian émigrés and German artists, including Gabriele Münter, who became his companion for the duration of his most formative years.
Stylistically, Kandinsky and his colleagues began to push the boundaries of their painting in the late summer of 1908. Four of them – Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin – made a painting trip to the village of Murnau in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The following summer, Münter bought a house there. It soon became known as the “Russian House” and provided the base from which the couple and their artist friends painted Murnau and its surroundings in a series of colourful, ever more innovative canvases.
Erich Heckel, Standing Child, 1911.
Colour woodcut, 37.5 x 27.7 cm.
Museum Folkwang, Essen.
Alexej von Jawlensky, Portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sakharov, 1909.
Oil on cardboard, 69.5 x 66.5 cm.
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) originated in a project conceived by Kandinsky and a younger colleague, Franz Marc, in 1911. They shared the desire to publish a new kind of periodical.
Before it was published, they staged a rather hastily-assembled group exhibition, the “1. Ausstellung der Redaktion des Blauen Reiter” (1st Exhibition of the Editors of the Blue Rider) at Munich’s Thannhauser gallery (December 1911 – January 1912). It was a motley mix of works by Henri Rousseau, Kandinsky, August Macke, Marc, Münter, the composer Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Delaunay among others. It went on to Berlin, where Herwarth Walden added works by Klee, Kubin, Jawlensky and Werefkin, before showing it as the first Sturm exhibition. A second Blaue Reiter exhibition, of international graphic works – including Picasso and the Russian Malevich – was staged almost immediately, in March and April 1912, at Hans Goltz’s gallery.
Of the planned periodical, only one issue appeared, in 1912, but it is arguably the most important single document of pre-war Expressionism: the Blaue Reiter Almanac. On one level it is a kind of sourcebook for artists of texts and images. However, taken as a whole, it can be read as an entire argument for a radical revision of art and how we look at it. Looking back, writing in 1930, Kandinsky described the motivation behind the Blaue Reiter project:
“It was at that time that my wish matured to assemble a book (a kind of almanac) in which artists would be the only authors. I dreamt primarily of painters and musicians. The ruinous separation of the arts from one another and, furthermore, of ‘Art’ from folk art and children’s art, from ‘Ethnography,’ the solid walls between phenomena that were, in my eyes, so closely related, often even identical: in a word the synthesis left me no peace”.
The almanac contains reproductions of paintings and graphic works by artists from El Greco to Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, the Douanier Rousseau, the Brücke colleagues Kirchner and Heckel, the Blaue Reiter artists and others are juxtaposed with objects and images from Latin America, Alaska, Japan and Africa. There are medieval
