Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German 1880-1938)
Woman, Tying Shoe, 1912
Woodcut on wove paper
12 1/8 x 10 inches
Syracuse University Art Collection
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (German 1884-1976)
Head of a Woman, 1916
Woodcut on wove paper
10 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches
All of the artists represented in Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints were persecuted by the Nazis. Their works were confiscated from German museums, held up to public ridicule, and either sold to buyers outside of Germany to fill the coffers of the Third Reich or destroyed. Not just a few works - Emil Nolde had 1,000 works confiscated, Erich Heckel 700, Otto Mueller 357. The purge wasn’t restricted to German artists - modernists of all stripes were denounced - but it was aimed principally at the German Expressionists who were characterized as mentally ill or retarded or depraved.
German Expressionism began in the early years of the 20th century as a reaction against the traditional academic style of painting and a push toward an art form that the Expressionists believed would capture the intensity and immediacy of their experiences. They were young idealists and bohemians who, in Kirchner’s words, wanted "freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces." When World War One began, many of them saw it as a good thing, a sweeping away of the old order. Some actually enlisted to fight, believing that this would be the war to end all wars and that a new, better age was imminent. But the horrors of the war and the suffering in its wake left them traumatized and disillusioned. Destitute workers crowding into industrialized cities, the decadence of Weimar society, political turmoil, aggression, tragedy, grief - these were the realities they depicted with intensity and immediacy in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise.
The Expressionists used all the art forms, but they had a particularly profound effect on printmaking, using this centuries-old medium in bold, new ways to convey the rawness of their emotions. "They were aware of the lauded traditions in German Renaissance printmaking, particularly the virtuosic woodcuts and engravings of Albrecht Dí¼rer early in the 16th, century," said Patricia Phagan, the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings. "However, Expressionists modernized the print into an immediate, driven, and often harsh statement of the inner life. They truly revolutionized printmaking."
Organized by the Syracuse University Art Collection, Impassioned Images is now showing at Vassar through the generous support of the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Exhibition Fund.