Since time immemorial, human form has been a significant subject in art. The History of Western art is filled with the nude paintings. Nudes were tended to idealize and philosophize human existence since the Ancient Greeks, but in German Expressionism, the nudes are rather more complex. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the Expressionist who drew nude as his subject matter is different from the idealistic nudes we have seen in Impressionism. This essay attempts to examine the use of nakedness of the body in German Expressionism through Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s significance work and evaluate the influencing factors linking to nudes and his emotional. As science and technology begin to improve society as a result of the growing numbers of factory and industry. …show more content…
Many people became lost as a result of these changes in modern life. The painter saw the world as scene of despair. The German Expressionist movement was active from around 1905-1925. It was known as “Die Brücke” and “Der Blaue Reiter” in German. The French critic Roger de Piles defined expressionism as “the thought of the human heart”. It is about expressing the artist’s feelings toward surrounding world. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was an expressionist in the Die Brücke group. He was living in an unstable period where his style of painting went from vivid color, free and simple to darker color, negative theme. He experienced anxieties that were felt widely and society as a whole. He got anxieties of the fear of humanity and the loss of spirituality and purity in the modern world. These emotions were found in one of his work Artillerymen in the shower in 1915 was his outlet for the new anxiety felt in the First World War. The painting portrayed naked boys crowded together, squeezed and compact together against the flow of water from the ceiling. They were weak and vulnerable with a sense of feminine of the rendering of their body except for their penises, they are virtually indistinguishable from each other. It shows the …show more content…
As Bassie suggested that nudes played a pivotal role in the Brücke’s practice where it was often as an idealized symbol of moral, physical and sexual liberation. The body and sexuality were differently cast in other Expressionist contests. The spiritual essence that marks the delight in past traditions is replaced with the men becoming a vehicle from human suffering. The purpose of Kirchner depiction of the group of naked soldier is to convey the weight of existential anxiety. The thick nervous brushstrokes embody the world he lived in and illustrates his inner state of restlessness as a response to military service. The distortion of the body figure, the thickness of brushstrokes in Artillerymen reflects the artist’s feeling and experience of the war. Kirchner’s work from this period does not seek to avoid the theme of war. The paintings are grounded in reality and reflect his new environment and his quotidian routine as a soldier. It could be argued that the art of Germany in its most unstable period of recent history reveals the harmful of war and unnecessary suffering makes us questioning the moral of human. The First World War disrupted the Expressionism in the early 1900s. Notions of war draft and the depersonalizing effect of the army on individuals invaded the every inch of canvas of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s work. The idea of primitive emotions does not sink, but the depiction of bodies became
In the history of modern western civilization, there have been few incidents of war, famine, and other calamities that severely affected the modern European society. The First World War was one such incident which served as a reflection of modern European society in its industrial age, altering mankind’s perception of war into catastrophic levels of carnage and violence. As a transition to modern warfare, the experiences of the Great War were entirely new and unfamiliar. In this anomalous environment, a range of first hand accounts have emerged, detailing the events and experiences of the authors. For instance, both the works of Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque emphasize the frightening and inhumane nature of war to some degree – more explicit in Jünger’s than in Remarque’s – but the sense of glorification, heroism, and nationalism in Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is absent in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Instead, they are replaced by psychological damage caused by the war – the internalization of loss and pain, coupled with a sense of helplessness and disconnectedness with the past and the future. As such, the accounts of Jünger and Remarque reveal the similar experiences of extreme violence and danger of World War I shared by soldiers but draw from their experiences differing ideologies and perception of war.
This movement started in Germany and later on settled in the United States. Neo-Expressionists were sometimes called Neue Wilden (“The Wild Ones”). The word Expressionism was a movement in poetry and in paintings and this usually would present the subjective perspective.
Prior to the 20th century, female artists were the minority members of the art world (Montfort). They lacked formal training and therefore were not taken seriously. If they did paint, it was generally assumed they had a relative who was a relatively well known male painter. Women usually worked with still lifes and miniatures which were the “lowest” in the hierarchy of genres, bible scenes, history, and mythological paintings being at the top (Montfort). To be able to paint the more respected genres, one had to have experience studying anatomy and drawing the male nude, both activities considered t...
Storm of Steel provides a memoir of the savagery and periods of beauty that Ernst Jünger’s experienced while serving the German army during the First World War. Though the account does not take a clear stand, it lacks any embedded emotional effects or horrors of the Great War that left so few soldiers who survived unaffected. Jünger is very straightforward and does remorse over any of his recollections. The darkness of the hallucinations Jünger reports to have experienced provides subtle anti-war sentiment. However, in light of the descriptive adventures he sought during the brief moments of peace, the darkness seems to be rationalized as a sacrifice any soldier would make for duty and honor in a vain attempt for his nation’s victory. The overall lack of darkness and Jünger’s nonchalance about the brutality of war is enough to conclude that the account in Storm of Steel should be interpreted as a “pro” war novel; however, it should not be interpreted as “pro” violence or death.
As the German painter and sculptor, Kathe Kollwitz conveyed in her statement that the art she created held the burden of transfiguration. The fixation of sorrow and hardship that occurred while she sat huddled with the children was the driving force of her drawings. Her realization that art could not only be an escape from the horror happenings in Germany such as the rationing of food and the starving-to-death children at that time was also a way to voice her opinion of change and revolution. It was the quest, in which she enamored in her drawings and it is this feeling that I value from it. I choose this artist because she delineated the various circumstances surrounding the human individual, she took into account perspectives that involved life with its tragedies, and the lives of little angel children. Her drawings and sculptures were prepared to emulate and capture what her eyes had seen while she was in Germany and this is why I had taken a likening to her drawings. The two artworks that I am specifying in this research paper is the drawing labeled “Germany's children starve!” and”Self-Portrait, Hand at the Forehead (Selbstbildnis mit der Hand an der Stirn)”.
As the young boy grew, he began to have a love for art and wanted to become an artist, but his father, however, did not have a care of his son’s dreams, but instead wanted him to grow up, following in his footsteps; in which Adolf rebelled against.
Throughout this paper, I will discuss the painting, “A Bit of War History” by Thomas Waterman Wood. I will analyze numerous of art techniques that evoke the theme of the portrait of the image and how it changes over three paintings which individually have their own unique meaning.
Specific techniques of German expressionism, such as dark vs. light, religious themes and spirituality, and the use
Max Ernst’s work has several dimensions and characteristics, most notably the dubious character of his illustrated worlds that have contributed to the appeal of the audiences. His prime concern was to present irresolvable isolation. As his father inspired his son a penchant for challenging the authority whilst being interested in painting and sketching nature, Ernst was motivated to take up painting himself. Moreover, he studied philosophy and psychology in 1909 at the Bonn University but also later dropped out. Most notably, during the course he visited an asylum and studied the work of the insane, a study inspired by Freud’s theory of the unconsciousness. This proved to be absolutely crucial in his development as an artist and took many ideas incorporated in Freud’s work and used them in order to identify himself – like other surrealists, he used it...
middle of paper ... ... Grosz is using this art to convey a feeling, and to bring us into World War I, not by showing what it actually looked like, but rather how it felt to be there. Modern art serves to immerse us more thoroughly in a scene by touching on more than just our sight. Artists such as Grosz, and Duchamp try to get us to feel, instead of just see. It seems that this concept has come about largely as a way to regain identity after shedding the concepts of the Enlightenment.
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
The German expressionism was an avant-garde movement that was more than just a style of creating art or film but it was more of a socio-cultural mindset of people. Expressionism can be seen as a way of approaching or tackling life changes.
The German Expressionism movement started in the early twentieth century art world, pre-WWI, presumably from Vincent Van Gogh’s “pioneering expressionist paintings like… Starry, Starry Night”(Encyclopaedia of Art History). It was a purely aesthetic movement at this time that sought to oppose the Impressionist movement, which imitated nature, by imposing unnatural, distorted images. Aspects of those distortions served to convey the emotions an artist held towards their subject. War brought terror. War brought mental meltdowns. War changed the Expressionistic style into a “bitter protest movement”(Encyclopaedia of Art History) as artists “suffered from war-induced disillusionment and were dissatisfied with post-war German
Morisot, Berthe. A Woman at Her Toilette. 1875-1880. Oil on Canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago, Illnois.
One of the most prevalent examples of German modernism was their newfound attitude towards art. Ekstein...