Online Study Guide

Revolution and World War :: Expressionism in Early 20th-Century Europe :: Embracing Abstraction :: Challenging Artistic Conventions :: Transatlantic Artistic Dialogues :: European Art in the Wake of World War I :: New Art for A New Society-Utopian Ideals :: Emphasizing the Organic :: Art As Political Statement in the 1930s :: Émigrés and Exiles: Energizing American Art at Midcentury

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EUROPEAN ART IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR I

After the World War I, many European artists were drawn to expressionism both to express and to deal with the trauma of world war.

Neue Sachlichkeit

The movement Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) grew out of the war experiences of a group of German artists who had served in the German army. Their military experiences deeply influenced their world views and informed their art.

Military horrors:

George Grosz's Passed—the Faith Healers is a caustic indictment of the military.

33-38: GEORGE GROSZ, Fit for Active Service, 1916–1917. Pen and brush and ink on paper, 1' 8" x 1' 2 3/8". Museum of Modern Art, New York (A. Conger Goodyear Fund). Copyright © Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Depicting world violence:

Max Beckmann's Night is a searing and horrifying comment on society's condition. The dislocated and contorted forms and the illogical space of the composition add to the savage brutality and violence of the scene.

33-39: MAX BECKMANN, Night, 1918–1919. Oil on canvas, 4' 4 3/8" x 5' 1/4". Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The devastation of war:

Otto Dix's War Triptych shows the devastation war inflicts on the terrain and on humans.

33-40: OTTO DIX, Der Krieg (The War), 1929–1932. Oil and tempera on wood, 6' 8 1/3" x 13' 4 3/4". Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden.

Other Postwar Art in Germany

Poignant prints:

In the woodblock print Memorial to Karl Liebknecht, Käthe Kollwitz represents the poor sorrowfully gathered around the bier of the assassinated leader of the 1919 socialist revolution.

33-41: KÄTHE KOLLWITZ, Woman with Dead Child, 1903. Etching and soft-ground etching, overprinted lithographically with a gold tone plate, 16 5/8" x 19 1/8". Trustees of the British Museum, London.

An elongated, expressive sculpture:

Wilhelm Lehmbruck's expressive sculpture Seated Youth combines classical idealism and psychological energy. The pose and elongated proportions of the figure impart an undertone of quiet anguish.

33-42: WILHELM LEHMBRUCK, Seated Youth, 1917. Composite tinted and plaster, 3' 4 5/8" x 2' 6" x 3' 9". National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Andrew W. Mellon Fund).

A haunting memorial of war:

In the suspended cast-bronze figure for his War Monument, Ernst Barlach created a hauntingly symbolic and expressive image that evokes both the spiritual anguish of the disaster of war and the release from that anguish through hope of salvation.

33-42: ERNST BARLACH, War Monument, from Güstrow Cathedral, Güstrow, Germany, 1927. Bronze. Schildergasse Antoniterkirche, Cologne.

Ernst Barlach

Surrealism and Fantasy Art

The Surrealist movement explored ways to express in art the world of dreams, the inner world of the psyche, and the realm of fantasy and the unconscious. The Surrealists employed many of the Dadaists' improvisational techniques, which they believed were important for engaging the elements of fantasy and activating the unconscious forces that lie deep within every human being. Some Surrealist artists, such as Joan Miró, pursued an interest in biomorphic Surrealism, while Naturalistic Surrealists, such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, in contrast, presented recognizable scenes that have undergone a metamorphosis into a dream or nightmare image.

Metaphysical painting:

Giorgio De Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street is an example of Metaphysical Painting in which the images transcend their physical appearances and evoke a disquieting sense of foreboding.

33-43: GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914. Oil on canvas, 2' 10 1/4" x 2' 4 1/2". Private collection. .

A sense of the psychic:

In Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, Max Ernst combines three-dimensional elements and a painted surface in a dislocated and incongruous relationship to create an ambiguous and indecipherable dream-like image that seeks deliberately to contradict and unbalance the spectator's expectations.

33-45: MAX ERNST, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924. Oil on wood with wood construction, 2' 3 1/2" high, 1' 10 1/2" wide, 4 1/2" deep. Museum of Modern Art, New York (purchase).

A disturbing blue dreamscape:

In his precisely painted The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí used his "paranoiac-critical method" to create a haunting allegory of empty space where time has ended.

33-46: SALVADOR DALÍ, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas, 9 1/2" x 1' 1". Museum of Modern Art, New York (given anonymously).

Words contradicting images:

René Magritte's meticulously rendered trompe l'oeil depiction The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images expresses the Surrealist dreamlike dissociation of image and meaning. The painting subverts the viewers' assumption by stating in the caption beneath the image of a pipe that "This is not a pipe".

33-47: RENÉ MAGRITTE, The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images, 1928–1929. Oil on canvas, 1' 11 5/8" x 3' 1". Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection).

Fuzzy logic:

In Object (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure), Meret Oppenheim lined with fur an otherwise functional teacup and thereby transformed it into an object that captures the incongruity, humor, visual appeal, and eroticism that characterizes Surrealist art.

33-48: MERET OPPENHEIM, Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), 1936. Fur-covered cup, 4 3/8" in diameter; saucer, 9 3/8" in diameter; spoon, 8". Museum of Modern Art, New York (purchase).

A personal and political portrait:

In her deeply personal double self-portrait The Two Fridas, Frida Kahlo uses the details of her life as powerful symbols for the psychological pain of human existence.

33-49: FRIDA KAHLO, The Two Fridas, 1939. Oil on canvas, 5' 7" x 5' 7". Collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.

Embracing the intuitive:

Joan Miró's Painting began as a scattered collage composition with assembled fragments cut from a catalogue for machinery. The shapes became motifs that Miró reshaped to create black silhouettes that float in an colorful immaterial background space. The creative process moved back and forth between unconscious and conscious image making to produce a spontaneous and intuitive expression of the submerged unconscious part of life.

33-50: JOAN MIRÓ, Painting, 1933. 5' 8" x 6' 5". Museum of Modern Art, New York (Loula D. Lasker Bequest by exchange).

Mechanical birds:

Paul Klee's small-scale Twittering Machine shows four diagrammatic mechanical birds whose twittering action appears to be produced by the turning of a crank-driven mechanism. The meaning of the image is ambiguous.

33-51: PAUL KLEE, Twittering Machine, 1922. Watercolor and pen and ink, on oil transfer drawing on paper, mounted on cardboard, 2' 1" x 1' 7". Museum of Modern Art, New York (purchase).