How 7 great expressionist painters conquered the world, whose works are appreciated all over the world: Munch, Kandinsky, etc

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The work of expressionist artists is a mystery that is so difficult to solve, and the images they create are so multifaceted and contradictory that, looking at them, there is a place for imagination to roam. The emphasis on colors, broken lines and torn strokes is only a small part of what, from the very first seconds, attracts the viewer's attention, drawing him into the eccentric world of art, where everything is not as simple as it seems at first glance, because each painting has its own story, and each artist has his own unsurpassed and recognizable style, which has become a visiting card for centuries …

1. Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, who was never married, called his paintings his children and hated being separated from them. Living alone on his estate near Oslo for the last twenty-seven years of his life, increasingly revered and increasingly isolated, he surrounded himself with work that dates back to the beginning of his long career. After his death in 1944, at the age of eighty, the authorities found behind locked doors on the second floor of his house a collection of more than a thousand paintings, four and a half thousand drawings and almost fifteen and a half thousand prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs. lithographic stones, woodcuts, copper plaques and photographs. However, in the last irony of his difficult life, Munch is known today as the creator of one image that overshadowed his overall achievement as a pioneer and influential artist and printmaker.

His Scream is an icon of modern art, a painting depicting an asexual, gnarled creature with a fetal face, mouth wide open and eyes wide open in a scream of horror, recreated a vision that gripped him one evening in his youth when he was walking with two friends. On the Sunset.

At Ackley, he took up landscape painting, portraying the countryside and farm life around him, first in cheerful colors and then in darker ones. He also returned to his favorite images, creating new versions of some of the paintings.

In the last years of his life, the artist supported the surviving members of his family financially and communicated with them by mail, preferring not to visit them. He spent most of his time alone, describing the suffering and humiliation of his advanced years. When he was struck by the near-fatal flu during the Great Pandemic, he captured his skinny, bearded figure in a series of self-portraits as soon as he could pick up a brush.

In addition, he painted a number of self-portraits, on one of them entitled "Between the clock and the bed", dating from 1940-1942, shortly before his death, the viewer sees what became of a man who, as he wrote, fell behind "Dance of life".

Frozen and physically awkward, he stands sandwiched between his grandfather's clock and the bed, as if apologizing for taking up so much space. On the wall behind him were his "children," one above the other. As a devoted parent, he sacrificed everything for them …

2. Wassily Kandinsky

One of the pioneers of abstract contemporary art, Wassily Kandinsky used the evocative relationship between color and shape to create an aesthetic experience that involved the sight, sound and emotions of the audience. He believed that complete abstraction allows for deep, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interferes with this process.

Highly inspired by the creation of art that would convey a universal sense of spirituality, he introduced a new pictorial language that only loosely connected with the outside world, but expressed much about the artist's inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed in three stages, moving from early, representational canvases and their divine symbolism to his enthusiastic and operatic compositions, as well as his later, geometric and biomorphic flat color depictions. Vasily's art and ideas have inspired generations of artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the abstract expressionists after World War II.

3. Egon Schiele

With his signature graphic style, embracing figurative distortion and bold defiance of conventional beauty norms, Egon Schiele was one of the leading figures in Austrian Expressionism.

His portraits and self-portraits, burning studies of the psyche and intimacy of his sitters, are some of the most striking and memorable works of the 20th century. The artist, strikingly prolific during his short career, is famous not only for his psychologically and erotically rich work, but also for his intriguing biography: his licentious lifestyle is marked by scandal, notoriety and a tragically early death from the flu at the age of twenty-eight, three days later. after the death of his pregnant wife, and at a time when he was on the brink of commercial success that eluded him for most of his career.

Egon was a key figure in the development of Expressionism in painting. He has written a phenomenal number of self-portraits and completed over three thousand drawings. His work often has intense emotional content in addition to frank exploration of the human body. He worked alongside Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, other key Austrian artists of the era.

Egon's short but fruitful artistic career, the explicit erotic content of his work and accusations of intimate harassment made him the subject of numerous films, essays and dance performances, and the Leopold Museum in Vienna has the largest collection of Schiele's works: more than two hundred exhibits.

4. Marc Chagall

Chagall's works are steeped in his Jewish heritage, often including memories of his home in Vitebsk, Belarus, and his folk culture. As a rule, the artist always returned to these themes. Some argue that his style of painting after the war was more restrained, melancholic, even turned back in time to post-impressionism, but, as always, his work was completely unique, done in his own inimitable style. Mark has combined elements of many schools of modern art throughout his career, including Cubism, Fauvism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Orphism, and Futurism. However, his work revealed deeper levels of resonant, lyrical emotional aesthetics, music and culture, a deep, inner understanding of the Jewish heritage.

In 1985, Chagall died and was buried in France. At the time of his death, he left behind a number of his extensive collections in various fields and styles of art. Mark's work demonstrates a masterful understanding of color and a deep emotional resonance, which is perhaps the reason that his work is still so popular today.

His contribution to the world of 20th century art is one that very few artists can claim.

5. Paul Klee

Paul was ambitious and idealistic, but kept a low profile and calm. He believed in the gradual organic evolution of events rather than forcing change, and his systematic approach to work echoed this methodical approach to life.

He was mainly a draftsman (left-handed, by the way). His drawings, sometimes very childish, were very precise and controlled.

Klee was a keen observer of nature and natural elements, which was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him. He often made his students observe and draw tree branches, human circulatory systems, and fish tanks to study their movement.

It wasn't until 1914, when Paul went to Tunisia, that he began to understand and explore color. In addition, he was inspired in his color studies by his friendship with Kandinsky and the works of the French artist Robert Delaunay. Paul learned from Delone what color can be when used in a purely abstract way, regardless of its descriptive role.

The artist was also influenced by his predecessors such as Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Franz Marc and other members of the Blue Rider group, who believed that art should express the spiritual and metaphysical, and not just what is seen and tangible.

Throughout his life, music had a great influence, manifesting itself in the visual rhythm of his images and in the staccato notes of his color accents. He created a picture very similar to a musician playing a piece of music, as if making music visible or visual art audible.

Klee's artistic legacy was immense, even if many of his successors did not openly cite his work as an obvious source or influence. During Paul's lifetime, the surrealists discovered that his seemingly random juxtaposition of text, abstract signs and reductive symbols suggests how the mind in a state of sleep recombines the disparate objects of everyday life and thus provides a new understanding of how the unconscious has power even over the reality of waking …

The artist's reputation grew significantly in the 1950s, when, for example, Abstract Expressionists could see his work in exhibitions in New York. Paul's use of signs and symbols was of particular interest to New York School artists, especially those interested in mythology, the unconscious, and primitivism (as well as the art of self-education and the art of children). Klee's use of color as an expressive means of expressing human emotions in itself also attracted artists with a preference for a rich color palette, such as Jules (Jules) Olitzky and Helen (Helene) Frankenthaler.

6. Franz Marc

As a leading figure in the German Expressionist movement, Mark helped redefine the nature of art. The Expressionist movement was known for its interest in spirituality and primitivism, as well as its use of abstraction. Franz incorporated his love of theology and animals into his work to create an alternative, more spiritual vision of the world. He portrayed the world through the eyes of animals, which he used to highlight aspects of modernity that he viewed unfavorably. But his later work also moved beyond representational forms into pure abstraction, paving the way for the next generation of artists.

Although his career was short, his expressive linear forms and symbolic use of color have had a lasting influence on the worlds of abstraction and expressionism. However, artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning can be called his descendants. These artists were inspired by Mark's ability to evoke feelings of emotion with his interest in the spiritual and the primitive, as well as his use of vibrant colors. Abstract Expressionists drew on Franz's contributions to create paintings that emphasized more minimal, generalized forms, focusing mainly on linear expression and color.

These new approaches to Expressionism sought to highlight the personal struggles of artists with the changes that took place after the end of World War II. Later generations of Expressionists, such as the color field painters who brought Expressionism to its most minimalist, simplistic state, can be seen as descendants of Mark and his contemporaries. Indeed, Franz Marc, as one of the founders of German Expressionism, was instrumental in defining modernism in the 20th century and beyond.

7. Van Gogh

Illustrative examples of Van Gogh's broad influence can be seen throughout art history. The Fauves and German Expressionists worked immediately after Van Gogh and adopted his subjective and spiritually inspired use of color. Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th century used Van Gogh's sweeping, expressive brushstrokes to show the psychological and emotional state of the artist. Even 1980s neo-expressionists like Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl owe a debt to Van Gogh's expressive palette and brush.

In popular culture, his life has inspired music and numerous films, including Vincent Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956), which explores the volatile relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin. During his life, Van Gogh created nine hundred paintings and made one thousand hundred drawings and sketches, but during his career he sold only one painting. The artist did not have children of his own, and most of his works went to his brother Theo.

Continuing the topic of great painters, read also about where the surrealist Joan Miró was looking for inspiration, and which of the poets and artists had the strongest influence on his work.