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Modernisms 1900-1980
Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 2
Lesson 2: Expressionism- Expressionism, an introduction
- Expressionism as Nordic?
- Der Blaue Reiter
- Kirchner, Street, Dresden
- Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, "Street, Berlin"
- Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait Nude with Amber Necklace, Half-Length I
- Emil Nolde, "Young Couple," 1913
- Jawlensky, Young Girl in a Flowered Hat
- Schiele, Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait)
- Nazi looting: Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally
- Schiele, Hermits
- Kandinsky, Apocalypse, Abstraction
- Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
- Vasily Kandinsky, "Klänge (Sounds)"
- Franz Marc and the animalization of art
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Kirchner, Street, Dresden
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, oil on canvas, 1908 (MoMA) Speakers: Dr. Juliana Kreinik, Dr. Steven Zucker, Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- I love the back and forth in this video. This is truly excellent. More friendly discord, please!(12 votes)
- My strong impression is that the image represents a womens liberation march in Vienna. During those years feminist Suffrage parades were very much in the picture. It is also a typical Brucke subject.(7 votes)
- I really like this interpretation of the painting as it's a more individual conclusion based on events that were happening in the early 1900's.(1 vote)
- @the presenters mention the word 'fauvism'. What is fauvism? How does this movement differ from neo-fauvism? 4:49(3 votes)
- There's a good introduction to Fauvism here: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/fauvism.html(5 votes)
- Am I alone in thinking that this painting is about the subjection of women? From left to right we have the swirling mass of the populace then we shift into the three women at the front (the little girl, the young woman and the mature woman) and in the right top corner, we have a woman surrounded by darkness and creepy men. Would it be a stronger argument that this painting is illustrating the life of women in the city that must endure the objectification of men and how strange it is that they prey on women on the height of a woman's youth?(2 votes)
- I think Kirchner may have been referencing the plight of urban women in 19th Europe. During the industrial revolution, poor women who had migrated from the country to the city were among the most vulnerable members of society. This is because they were cut off from family and traditional support systems in their communities, were largely illiterate or unskilled and when they were able to gain employment, they could expect to be paid less the half of what their male counterparts did. All this was made worse by the fact that poor women who often became prostitutes were widely blamed for so-called "urban moral decay." The book 'An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art' by Michelle Facos has some excellent discussion on this topic. You can read chapter excerpts here: http://www.19thcenturyart-facos.com/(5 votes)
- i watched the videos on fauvism and i don't understand why expressionism is considered a different period or school, don't both of them have a degree of abstraction and usage of emotional non-representative color? what make them different other the geographical reason ?(4 votes)
- How did Nietzsche's deconstructed idea of morality affect the way Die Brücke artists portrayed people?(2 votes)
- Why don't there seem to be many popular female expressionists? It seems the major revolutionists are all male. Was it the time period?(1 vote)
- You may want to look at the work of the Russian, Natalia Goncharova and at the German, Gabriele Münter.(2 votes)
- The emotion in the woman in the backgrounds face strikes my attention the most.(1 vote)
- The position of all the people in the painting seem to be very important in understanding how the painting flows and what it's saying. That being said, how does that little girl tie into the painting? What might the artist be trying to represent by painting the girl to be sort of standing out from behind the women?(1 vote)
- The way the little girl's hat is surrounded by the pink background reminds me of a christian halo. I don't know if that was a suggestion, or simply trying to separate the girl from the rest of the women.(1 vote)
- On their topic about women in the city, Kirchner's later streetwalker paintings, &etc, what strikes me in this painting is that the street is filled with women. Up until this painting (in this Art Hist web series), it's been said that women's domain was in the home and other street scenes show women accompanied by men and with their children, and also those streets don't have 99% women. Could it be about a shift in "women's place" in society? Ditto the little girl -- her ungainliness, that she's unaccompanied, that she's unwittingly standing in the path of an oncoming streetcar...(1 vote)
- I think the streetcar is leaving.
And the girl is not unaccompanied. To her right there is a profile seems to be her parent which is behind the nearest woman figure.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(bouncy piano music) >> We're looking at a painting at the Museum of Modern Art by
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It's Street Scene Dresden
and it dates to 1908. >>Kirchen is known as
an expressionist artist. That's his classification. >> He would become part of a group called Die Brucke. >> Yes, The Bridge. >> The Bridge, as they called themselves. >> What did the bridge mean? What was it a bridge to and from? >> From the past to the future. >> Well yes, from the past to the future, but it refers really
directly to Nietzsche. >> Really? >> I didn't know that. I
didn't know that either, but it makes it much more interesting. >> Thus, speak Die Brucke. The bridge from civilization
to the Uberwanch, Crossing the bridge, it's a
journey of self-discovery, of individual self-actualization. >> There were so many German artists and craftsmen that were
really interested in Nietzsche at this moment, right? >> Obsessed is a better word. >> Yes, yes. >> What was it about Nietzsche? >> Well, he was interested in taking apart ideas of morality which
constricted culture so much, I think all over Europe
but especially in Germany. I think the young artists, I think Kirchen was not even 30 at this point, they're all pretty young, and they're really interested in renewal and the new. >> Germany was late coming to the Industrial Revolution, right? >> Yes. >> There's a lot of
change that's happening in a very compressed time period. >>They, in the later 19th Century, really tried to catch up to England and France and they worked really hard to do that. Then there was a lot
of growth really fast, but there are all these culture morays that they worked really
hard to break out of and Nietsche was totally
influential and inspirational because he posited all these
ways of breaking out of. >> It was very constrictive, proper. >> Accountable for.. >> Yes, yes so that you wouldn't be proper and contained. >> Even in this painting,
there is a kind of isolation amongst those figures, isn't there? >> Definitely. >> Even though it's a
crowded, really dense scene; this is a pretty wild painting really. >> I have to say I know
that you like this painting. >> I do; I love this painting. >> I have always really not. >> I love this painting. (laughter) >> Right, so I want to
hear from both of you then. >> Why do you not like this painting? >> It feels very like
a man looking at women on the street and I know that they're... I don't know; I guess for me it doesn't build all that much more
on the 19th Century, on Munch's Street Scene
of Karl Johan Strasse. >> Right, from 1892. >> That kind of interest
in psychological angst and alienation in the modern world and using color to describe those things and brush work. This, as a symbolist
artist, I really like this. >> So did the Germans by the way. >> Yeah. >> They really heroized him, right? >> Then when I get to this and the colors become more garish and more difficult, the composition a little more disjointed, the brush work more open, I'm not sure how much this adds. I guess there's something
uncomfortable to me about the way that he's
looking at the women here. >> For me, the color
and garishness is what attracted me to it. I love the distortion. I love the green; I love the orange. I love the orange tracing
around the woman's hat. It's glowing. I just love looking at that. I feel like it's neon. If you look again at
the entire composition, I love things that kind of pop out at different moments. I think it is about
looking and it is about voyeurism and it is about the male gaze. If you look on the right
side of the painting, I love that he's caught halfway out of the composition. Degas did that in 1872. I think for me this
sort of feels very much about isolation and German angst. >> The point that you were
making about Degas I thought was an interesting one because in some ways France is going through those issues when Degas was painting and Germany is a little bit later, but
that doesn't make this not authentic, an authentic expression of that moment. I'm not saying that
they're the same thing, but the issue is industrial alienation and the issue of urban
alienation I think are both very important issues in both of those painter's work. This is clearly a 20th Century work. There are lessons that have learned and freedoms that have been generated from post-Impressionism and from other artists. >> I think of Fauvism. >> Exactly. >> Just the coloration I
think for me is something that makes it extremely
early 20th Century. >> It's not the beauty of Fauvism. >> No, it's not. >> This is really a kind of aggressive. >> I like that. >> So Van Gogh's Night
Cafe, he wanted to give the Night Cafe a sense
of darkness and misery by means of red and green. That's what Van Gogh said 20 or 30 years before this. He's got that horrible pink
color in that painting. >> Maybe the power here is the very thing that you don't like which
is the women as subject. >> Well, I know that he's doing images of prostitutes on the street and I guess that knowing that informs my looking at this painting. It starts to make me really
worried about the way that modern historians
look at these images. >> I think that his, because
I think of his prostitute, the streetwalker scenes
as five years later. >> He's in Berlin, right? >> He's in Berlin and they're in like Potsdam or Platts and Friedrichshafen, those main city centers
and where the women... That's a lot more
strident and the women are definitely the focus of the male gaze. There are a lot of men kind of circling around the women. Those are less interesting to me. Also, I think just even
in terms of looking at the color and composition
for some reason and I know that a lot of people like those more. His style is more developed and he's more mature as an artist. I like that this is more raw. Kirchen, he's really
focusing on that authentic, kind of direct engagement with the experience of the city, the electric, the movement. >> A kind of constant
shift and change here as if all of those voids,
that wonderful pink area, is constantly changing and shifting as the figures that define that space move. >> I feel like he's
experimenting with something. >> Could we see the
women here as sympathetic in some way, maybe if I wasn't reading it through the guise of those later images of prostitutes on the street. She does look out at us. She's lit by the lights of the city. When you said neon, I
could sort of feel that, those kinds of lights maybe in the dusk in the city. She looks out at us. >> Well, they don't look to me honestly like prostitutes. >> Right, I'm saying
they're bourgeois women, but maybe there is something sympathetic about her
if we don't look at her through the lens of those later images. >> I think there is. I guess to me it just seems like these isolated figures and that's what attracts them to me. Like it's a theater; if
you look at the side, there's almost like a pillar figure, of that male figure, kind of holding the
picture together and it pulls your eye in and he's right there and he's sort of between you
and the female figures. Then everything kind
of recedes behind that diagonally to the left in the back. You see the girl in the center stage. >> What makes it theatrical? >> I think the lighting and the way the figures are arranged. >> That could almost be limelight coming from below. What I love about it
is, although it's a city and you have the slightest
trace of the trolley track, there's no architecture. The entire space is
defined by the occupation of these figures or their
occupation in space. In a sense, it's the city
defined by these people, defined by space itself shaped by this changing crowd
which I think is really an interesting idea. He's not using buildings. He's not even really using intersections. He's using people to define the space and then in a sense to build a city out of the people... >> Out of the shifting masses. This is Koenigstrasse in Dresden which is a main thoroughfare of
shopping so there's a lot of traffic and movement
and this is definitely part of a very well-known
street and a very well-known area and it's very populated. >> In the second half of the 19th Century when artists' painted street
scenes, like Degas because this looks to
me like he's looking at Degas, but there is more of a sense of architecture and place. >> Yes, there's nothing
here that's stable. Everything here will be
different in a moment and there's something sort
of wonderful about that. >> Yeah. I think I like
also just looking at that little girl and her big hat and her ugly, kind of claw-like hand. I think she's holding some kind of toy. >> Or flowers maybe. >> Or flowers or something, but in the painting it really looks scary. >> Yes, yes. There's also
the way that her legs are slightly splayed and there's something very ungainly. >> Her hair is kind of
dripping down the sides of her face. >> Yes, that kind of inelegant. Actually throughout the entire painting, there's this really
interesting tension between the effort and elegance in the dress but then the ungainliness
or the aggression of the representation. This is sort of wonderful
sort of back and forth. (bouncy piano music)