by their reading of Whitman. Later, Kirchner described how in times of suffering and hunger in Dresden and after, Leaves of Grass was an abiding source of encouragement.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Man and Woman Striding into the Sea, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 146 x 200 cm.
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart.
A passage from “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass is interesting to consider in relation to Man and Woman Striding into the Sea. Whitman submits himself, naked, to the sea as if it were a lover. In so doing, he expresses ecstatically the longed-for fusion with nature itself that became so central to Expressionist thinking:
You sea! I resign myself to you also… I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;
We must have a turn together… I undress… hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft… rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet… I can repay you.
Sea of stretched ground-swells!
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!
Sea of the brine of life! Sea of unshovelled and always-ready graves!
Howler and scooper of storms! Capricious and dainty sea!
I am integral with you… I too am of one phase and of all phases.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bathers at Moritzburg, 1909–1926.
Oil on canvas, 151.1 x 199.7 cm.
Tate Modern, London.
Indeed, it is noticeable that in many Brücke pictures of this period, men and women are often physically wedged between rocks, into the nooks of tree branches, between the rolling sea’s waves or sprawled on the sand – literally embedded in nature. In a painting made the following summer by Schmidt-Rottluff, the simplified forms, the red of the figures and the dunes as well as the lack of horizon all amplify a comparable sense of archaic synthesis between human beings and nature.
It is also interesting to compare, in this respect, the work of Franz Marc. A key member of the Blaue Reiter circle, and thus engaged in different debates around art, Marc was a painter with an intensely sensitive affinity with nature. However, his response to nature is not mediated by man’s presence in it or by the vitality of the natural body, such as we see in the Brücke works. His work is overwhelmingly concerned with the landscape, the animal kingdom and natural phenomena. There is only an occasional human presence in these landscapes.
Furthermore, his humans, unlike his animals, are strangely ephemeral and undifferentiated. Even when they are physically active – for example, carrying felled timber or bathing in a waterfall – they are oddly passive. They even have a somnambulist quality. Their gaze is downcast, their eyes closed. They neither luxuriate in, nor animate the landscape. In Marc’s work, men and women are either incidental or have no place at all in a world that belongs to his complex, sentient animals. In his Shepherds of around 1911, a telling role reversal has taken place; while the shepherds doze, naked, placid and vulnerable, the horse and cow seem to stand guard and keep watch, quietly alert.
The Brücke’s Rousseauean longings were, indeed, only a part of the wider Expressionist movement’s fascination and engagement with the human form. For all its sexual democracy, belief in ideal equality between the sexes, and rejection of the conventional artist-model relationship, the Brücke nonetheless consisted of male artists focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on the female nude.
Furthermore, almost all of their human subjects (in the period prior to the 1913 split) are young, attractive and healthy. In line with their bohemian aspirations, they celebrated “marginal” figures, from adolescents to circus performers and prostitutes, but in this period, their embrace only rarely extended to older subjects, the infirm, the sick or the unexotic. In general, it was elsewhere and later that more nuanced variations on the body could be found within Expressionism.
Ultimately, the Great War and its shattering effects on European civilisation as well as on individual bodies was what rendered early Expressionism’s vital exuberance and fantasies of wholeness no longer tenable. Later chapters will examine these effects in further detail.
There is, within Expressionism, another, very different dramatisation of the body. Appropriately, it is to Vienna, city of Freud and psychoanalysis that we look. From here emerged some of the most dramatic, controversial and unflinching Expressionist representations of the body, its sensations and the inner psychic life of human beings. This is the subject of the next chapter.
Egon Schiele, Kneeling Girl in Orange-Red Dress, 1910.
Gouache, watercolour and black crayon on paper, 44.6 x 31 cm.
The Leopold Collection, Vienna.
THE SELF AND THE PSYCHE
Oskar Kokoschka, Cotton Picker, 1908.
Tempera painting, 94.5 x 39.2 cm.
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
A potent aspect of Expressionism was the conviction, held by its creators, that their endeavours were carrying art into a wholly new realm of experience. Expressionist art could display spectacular technical innovation, as even relatively early works by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka make clear. However, formal, surface qualities were a means, not an end. Expressionism aspired to give form to nothing less than a new kind of inward vision. It involved a heightened perception that appeared, to some viewers, to verge on clairvoyance. Expressionists sought an intimate, subjective, and deeply resonant communication between the artist and the viewer. Kokoschka described it as “form-giving to the experience, thus mediator and message from self to fellow human. As in love, two individuals are necessary. Expressionism does not live in an ivory tower, it calls upon a fellow being whom it awakens”. This chapter considers this longed-for mediation between the “self” and the viewer by focusing on the work of some of those Expressionists who probed most deeply the psychic life of themselves and their subjects.
Straining against the moral grip of conventions of thought, speech and behaviour inherited from the nineteenth century, Expressionism was the means by which many artists and writers tried to give free expression to the instinctively, authentically wayward psyche – to break out of the straitjacket, as it were. Sigmund Freud’s research into the unconscious and the processes of repression – whereby painful memories or unacceptable impulses are consigned to the unconscious – only appeared to confirm the existence of a powerful and conflict-ridden “inner life”. In attempting to give expression to repressed aspects of the psyche, Expressionist art, literature, theatre, dance and music therefore tended to emphasise what was unruly, violent, chaotic, ecstatic or even demonic. Eros and Thanatos, sex- and death-drives, were recurrent underlying themes. This kind of excavation of the psyche was especially marked in the radical new art that started to emerge from Austria around 1910. As Vienna’s definitive satirist Karl Kraus, put it, “form is not the dress of thought, but its flesh”.
Arnold Schoenberg was a serious painter as well as a composer. By 1909, he said he felt aware that, in his music, he had broken all ties with the past. He was
