Expressionism Emergence of the Gothic Soul

Before The Great War of 1914-18 (in the period between 1870 and 1914) there followed, in swift succession, all the movements that were to comprise the mainstream of ‘modern art’. These are the styles and philosophies that, even today, signify ‘the Modern’ to many people: Impressionism (1870), Naturalism (1880), Decadence (1884), Symbolism (1890), Art Nouveau (1900), Fauvism (1906), Cubism (1907), Futurism (1909) and Vorticism (1912).

It was, perhaps, the stylistic innovations of Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism which, above all conveyed, in the most unambiguous terms the ‘shock of the new’ to bewildered observers, inspiring excitement or derision in probably equal proportion. Simultaneity, multi-perspectivism, stream-of-consciousness, atonal ‘expressionstic’ music, modern dance and the barbaric outburst of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Ballet Russes, 1913) characterized a widely perceived cliche of the avant-garde.

In Germany, from about 1910, many of these tendencies were intermingled and not clearly distinguished. In fact almost any modernistic work using distortion techniques and aggressive colour, or semi-abstraction, was liable to be labeled ‘Cubist’, ‘Futurist’ or ‘Expressionist’ with little attention to classificatory precision. The term most used was, in fact, ‘Expressionist’.

Expressionism emerged around the year 1910 in the German cultural sphere, although the term itself dated from as early as 1901. However, by 1911, the art historian Wilhelm Worringer was using the term in the context of the 22nd Berlin Secession Exhibition, which included the works of Picasso, Braque and Duffy. The term was used in reaction to Impressionism. The Great War claimed the lives of a number of poets whose aesthetic was that of the decadent fin-de-siecle – among them Gellner, Marten, Petkovic-Dis and others. Some like the Austrian Georg Trakl, often classified as Expressionist, appeared to be developing in a new direction. The main precursors of this new emphasis were Nietzsche, Munch and Strindberg whose work was marked by an introspective fascination with the neurotic and the perversely pathological. Similar tendencies may be detected in the frank eroticism of some Austrians, notably Klimt and Egon Schiele. Schiele’s drawings of women and indeed himself in the context are still controversial and condemned as pornographic. The febrile physicality of his drawings signaled the stylistic transformation from Art Nouveau to Expressionism.

Among the pioneers of Expressionst painting were (aside from Munch, already mentioned) Kubin, Van Gogh, Gauguin and James Ensor. If Expressionism is to be seen as a specifically German phenomenon earlier strands of development can also be isolated; for example, the German and Swiss Mannerists, and the Sturm und Drang Neo-Mannerism of Fuseli. Fuseli’s stylised, erotic and grotesque images such as ‘Garrick and Mrs Pritchard in Macbeth’ (1812) or ‘The Mad House’ (1772) or ‘The Nightmare’ (1781) exemplify the ‘crisis’ mentality of distortional Mannerism. Critics like Bazin, who seem to subscribe to some theory of anthropomorphic phylogeny in cultural trends and stylistic cycles, often label Mannerism a ‘sickness of styles’ or a ‘movement of crisis’. For Bazin, for instance Mannerism is an extravagance of gesture and expression, an over lengthening of proportions and unnaturally twisted attitudes in the portrayal of figures.

This categorization identifies Mannerism and neo-Mannerist revivals as periodic eruptions of ‘nervous imbalance’, a ‘sort of neurosis’ caused by lack of self-definition. The twisted attitudes not only apply to style but also are applied to the artists themselves. Not surprisingly, Mannerism in style is linked to Decadence and the fin-de-siecle. Extreme anguished mannerism can become expressionistic. Mannerist elements may be detected in painters like Moreau or Delville. The distorted, elongated figures of Jan Toorop, or the Glasgow ‘Spook School’ also exemplify this tendency. One thinks of the elegant mannerisms of Burne-Jones and the more biting caricatural mannerism of Beardsley and the languid figures of Art Nouveau generally. In Art Nouveau, this mannerist distortion is decorative and projects an ambience of Baudelaire’s volupte, like the warm currents of Wagnerian orchestration – this is the ‘neurosis’ of decadent hedonism, untroubled (on the surface) by the fevers of anxiety but open to ‘camp’ provocation.

But in the works of others like James Ensor, Leon Spilleaert, Emile Fabry, Georges Minne or Adolfo Wildt a more tortured, acerbic element is introduced which dispalces the voluptuous languor of decadence. This was linked to a type of ‘primitivism’ that looks back to pre-mannerist or even tribal exemplars. In Europe this is the Gothic tradition of Durer, Altdorfer and the ghastly realism of Grunewald’s ‘Crucifixions’. This Gothic tradition also includes masters of the grotesque like Hans Baldung Grien (1484-1545), N. M. Deutsch (1484-1530), Urs Graf (1485-1527) and early German masters like Schongauer (1445-1491) and The Master E.S. (died c1467).

Referring to this Gothic element, which lies at the heart of German post-Symbolist Expressionism, Paul Fechter wrote in 1914:

the same urge has always been valid in the Germanic World. It is the old Gothic soul which… despite all rationalism and materialism, again and again raises its head.

As John Willett observes (John Willett, Expressionism, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), Fechter was writing in 1914 at ‘the end of the first period of Expressionism’. Fechter was taking stock of an established trend, which, although it continued after 1919 until the Nazi purges, was already becoming an historical phenomenon. Expressionism maintains continuity with late Symbolism and shares many of its mythopoeic irrationalist elements and connects with the Gothic tale of terror closely identified with German Romanticism.

Transcendental Expressionism was identified with the lyrical abstractions of Kandinsky and Marc and the occult philosophy of Rudolf Steiner based at his Swiss headquarters, Dornach. According to Fechter Steiner was ‘the prophet of a new spirituality’ whose writings contain ‘visions’ which prefigure any ‘cubist’, Futurist or expressionist picture’ and seem like ‘anticipations of modern art’. C. G. Jung, writing in the 1920s identified ‘expressionism’ as an artistic symptom of the spiritual problem of ‘modern man’. Steiner’s writings at this time included Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897), Theosophy (1904), Friedrich Nietzsche. A Fighter Against His Time (1895), Occult Science: An Outline (1913), Knowledge of Higher Worlds (1909) and The Threefold Commonwealth (1920). This latter work was an utopianist political theory in which Steiner tried to interest the Kaiser. As a result Steiner was subjected to numerous attacks by Germanic nationalist groups and accused of fermenting a Jewish-Masonic-Communist conspiracy. He was also accused of practicing sexual occultism by the volkisch illuminist, Dietrich Eckart. These attacks culminated in the destruction by fire of Steiner’s Goetheanum building in Dornach.

This first period of Expressionism centred on the activities of magazines like Die Aktion (1911) and Der Sturm (1910) which repreented the views of artists and intellectuals opposed to Hohenzollern values, who were anti-militarist, and anti-materialist. In the sphere of literature their acknowledged precursors were (apart from Nietzsche) Rimbaud, Strindberg, Meyrink, Kleist, Grabbe, Dostoyevsky and leaders of German Romanticism such as Hoffmann and the poet Holderlin. The Expressionists were also steeped in the German occult tradition – Trithemius, Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the mystical idealism of Boheme and the Rosicrucians, mediated by Schopenhauer and intermingled with Buddhist-influenced theosophy. All of these themes were unified into a new cult of geist or Energy. It has been said that Expressionism was an attempt ‘to create a visionary world’; a world liberated from conventional language and bourgeois values. The geist was expressive of the ‘deepest levels of the personality’ but reaffirms modernity through symbols of contemporary industrial society. This cult of inner forces can become a cult of ‘formless activity’ connecting the artist to extremes of experience. This idea of the ‘experience of limits’ has since been identified as the basis for much modernist innovation. These extremes can lead to various forms of political or religious commitment, but also to ‘nihilism and self-annihilation’. Which part of the political spectrum, or which specific religious doctrine one became involved with was really somewhat inconsequential. In Germany most Expressionists adhered to any of the various occult groups, or were attracted to left-wing activism.

The poetic Expressionist movement of 1910-1914 included George Heym, whose collection of poems Der ewige Tag (1911) contained prophecies of the coming war. With Trakl and Ernst Stadler he was the most important of the early Expressionists. He was influenced by Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and seemed to be obsessed with a sense of all-pervasive evil. He was tragically drowned in a skating accident on a Berlin lake in 1912. Ernst Stadler was killed at Ypres (Zandvoorde) in 1914. Other victims of the battlefield included August Stramm, (whose staccato, fractured poetic language expressed the Expressionist ethos more successfully than any), was killed on the Dniper-Bug Canal (Russian Front) in 1915. Gerrit Engelke, Alfred Lemm, Alfred Lichtenstein and Peter Baum were also fatalities on the side of The Central Powers.

A.C. Evans
Illustration: Egon Schiele, Self Portrait, 1913

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