Dresden, 1905

                 Die Brucke, KIRCHNER

Yesterday I visited an exhibition of German expressionism with two friends. Later, as we walked down the street very fast, I was thinking about what we had seen. It was late in the evening and the sun was setting. I stopped to take a breath and put a question to my friends: “Did you like it?” They kept on walking and I could hear “pretty good”, “quite interesting”. I stood there exhausted, leaned on a garbage container, under a blood-red sky, and then I felt a dreadful scream from outside coming straight at me…

It was one of my friends telling me, “It is late; we must hurry if we want to have a drink before going home”.

Intense colours, distorted shapes, grotesque figures, exaggeration and fantasy… That is what I saw, pictures from a new artistic movement that emerged in Germany in the early years of the last century.

Discontent with the reality in which they had to live, these artists put their focus on emotional aspects. They painted reality according to their feelings, using the outside world to represent the inner. The point of view changed from object to subject.

Their immediate antecedents were Edward Munch and James Ensor. The former is well known for his famous work “The Scream”, while the latter is characterized by his paintings of masked people and carnival parades as the best way to denounce social hypocrisy.

                                    Intrigue, ENSOR

In 1905, in the city of Dresden, four architecture students would found the group “Die Brücke” (“The Bridge”). Social and political tensions were severe and these painters felt anger and frustration. The necessity to express the harshness of their world made them move away from traditional forms to a new language. When we see their subjects painted in such an ugly way we are seeing what they thought about their compatriots and their social habits and rules.

While my friends and I had a drink, we start talking about expressionism. I wondered whether those times were so different from ours. Beyond obvious things, maybe the most important difference is between the commitment, the will to do something that they had, and the conformism, the lack of this will today.

The most important artists of this group were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of its founders, and Emil Nolde.

       Two Women In The Street, KIRCHNER

Another group, called “Der Blaue Reiter” (The Blue Rider), was founded in Munich in 1911. In this second group were painters like Wassily Kandinsky, pioneer of abstract art, and Franz Marc.

              Composition VII, KANDINSKY

               

                                                                   
                                                                     Blue Horses, MARC 

The First World War was seen by some of these artists as an opportunity to change the world and perhaps also to be heroic. Instead, it only brought horror and mental breakdowns, and the aftermath of the war was one of cynicism and disgust at the new society that replaced the autocratic rule of the Kaiser. After Hitler came to power, expressionism was declared decadent and morally unfit and many such works were burnt in Nazi bonfires. 

After a few drinks, we three left the pub and went home singing a song. There were not many people in the street, but people we saw seemed so strange to me, laughing softly, grinning, and sometimes muttering...I guess at a certain time decent people are at home sleeping.

                                                               The Scream, MUNCH

“I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature”- Munch, explaining the origin of his masterpiece.

Van Trung