"In all
its forms the movement stood out against fascism and this, together with its so called 'degenerate' qualities (it was anti-Aryan
and anti-naturalism) led to the persecution of many Expressionist artists under the Nazi regime."
Edvard Munch- The Frieze of Life
"It shall no longer be painted interiors, people who read and women who knit. It shall be living humans who breath and feel,
suffer and love..."
Franz Marc-
The works of German Expressionist painter Franz Marc and the music of Schumann: Reverie
Chagall- Berlioz, fantasy on " The Tempest"
Caspar David Friedrich- J.S. Bach por Barroco Andino
This Video
500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art
Music: Bach's Sarabande from Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 performed by Yo-Yo Ma
James Ensor - EXPRESSIONISM
James Ensor By They Might Be Giants
JAMES ENSOR - EXPRESSIONIST
PLAYFUL LOVERS?( my Title) Posted by Hello
"During the 1880s Ensor turned to specifically religious subjects, frequently based on the torments of Christ. They are not
interpreted in a narrowly religious sense, but are rather a personal revulsion to a world of inhumanity that nauseated him.
This feeling , essentially unreligious and misanthropic, was climaxed in the vast ENTRY OF CHRIST INTO BRUSSELS IN 1889( painted in 1888), which depicts the passion
of Christ as the center of an enormous Flemish kermess or carnival symptomatic of the indifference, stupidity, and venality
of the modern world. Here, too, the artist gave early expression to his feeling about a horrible compression of humanity that
denies and destroys the space of the picture. It is indicative of Ensor's bitter humor that he dated this obscene carnival
- which is also his personal Last Judgement-one year in the future.
EXPRESSIONIST JAMES ENSOR
SURROUNDED BY THE DEAD (my title) Posted by Hello JAMES ENSOR
A BANQUET AT CAFE APOLLINAIRE ( my title) Posted by Hello The sense of death was strong in Ensor, manifesting itself in inumerable paintings,
drawings, and prints perpetuating the walking dead of the late Middle Ages and the danse macabre. Skeletons try to warm their
pathetic bones at a stove clearly imprinted " pas de feu. " Death with his scythe mows down the people of Brussels. The artist
in 1888 portrays himself in 1960 as a relatively cheerful skeleton on the verge of complete disintegration. In Skeletons Fighting
for the Body of a Hanged Man, the drama is enacted on a narrow stage reminiscent of Callot and the tradition of the Italian
commedia dell'arte. "
From HISTORY
OF MODERN ART by H.H. ARNASON pub. 1970? (p. 158 )
I hope you enjoy the pretty pictures.
This is my kind of painting. Stuff you can really sink your teeth into!!!
George Grosz political activist, satirist who was accused even before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis
of being unpatriotic, anti-German and as being decadent and beyond redemption - the Nazis later also condemned , banned and
publicly burned his works in order to cleanse Germany of such decadence and unGerman thoughts, feelings and sentiments.
The Americans though on the other hand were unable to appreciate Grosz's scathing yet prophetic attacks on fascism and Nazism
seeing his response as a bit extreme. Little did they know how correct he and other critics of Fascism and Nazism really were.
And as we know most Americans, Canadians and Brits prefer their art to be pretty and empty of all profound meaning or sense
of real humanity. We are in the age of Dr. Pangloss and that this is the best of all possible worlds so why bitch and moan
and gripe just sit back and become comfortably numb as Pink Floyd would say so there you go...
"Everywhere, hymns of hatred were struck up. Everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the Junkers, the Communists, the
army, the property owners, the workers, the unemployed, the black Reichwehr, the control commissions, the politicians, the
department stores, and the Jews again. It was an orgy of incitement, and the republic itself was a weak thing, scarcely perceptible.
… It was a completely negative world, topped with colorful froth that many imagined to be true, happy Germany before
the onset of the new barbarism." George Grosz
After moving to America in 1933 Grosz whole attitude appeared to change as he adapted to his new environment while trying
to make a living so he created works with less vigor or passion to appease the American academics and its bourgeois apolitical
artistic community.
"My motto was now to give offence to none and be pleasing to all. Assimilation is straightforward once one overcomes the greatly
overvalued superstition concerning character. To have character generally means that one is distinctly inflexible, not necessarily
for reasons of age. Anyone who plans to get ahead and make money would do well to have no character at all. The second rule
for fitting in is to think everything beautiful! Everything – that is to say, including things that are not beautiful
in reality." George Grosz
Note: The George Grosz drawings below which are From Graphic Witness? George Grosz Abrechnung Folgt! 57 Politische Zeichnungen
Translated as "One Day We'll Get Even" or, "The Day of Reckoning," this collection of 57 political drawings was published
in 1923 by Der Malik, in Berlin.
Part of a series titled "Kleine revolutionare Bibliothek," the series comprised a dozen titles, including other works by Grosz:
Das Gesicht der Herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class); Ecco Homo, Gott Mit Uns, Im Schatten (In the Shadow) and
Die Räuber.
George Grosz (German, 1893-1958): Ecce Homo
"Whoever can, swims, and whoever is weak, goes under" FAMILY IS THE FOUNDATION OF THE NATION: GEORGE GROSZ
MY PENSION : GEORGE GROSZ ( Heroic Wounded War Veteran Left To Beg ) CAUTION:
DON'T STUMBLE: GEORGE GROSZ HITLER IN HELL: GEORGE
GROSZ
"Those who eat well
...forget easily"
My Fatherland, May You Rest In Peace (quiet )
I. The Director --
[Die Räuber, 1922] " I will exterminate everything
around me that restricts me from being master"
-- and his puppets
2. "They thunder sweetness and light from their clouds and offer human sacrifice to the god of love"
-- from Schiller, act II scene iii
Note: The Master will use religion as a tool to get what he desires much like the attitude of the Neoconservatives who also
use religion and Patriotism for their own agenda. But the people are too stupid too know any better.
From Spaightwood Galleries we get this illuminating characterization of the artist's motives which were at odds with the somewhat insane and perverse
society in which he found himself.
Grosz was fascinated by amusement parks and the circus, and he particularly loved clowns. He saw them as playing the same
tragicomic role that the artist was forced to act on a bourgeois society. Grosz used his art of the early Berlin years to
attack the self-contentedness of the bourgeois, primarily its plutocrats, during the German Empire. He anticipated the far
in advance the disillusionment and shock of World War I as well as the change in art and society brought by the chaos of 1918.
. . . Grosz’s paintings depicted modern city life with its desire, passions, and crimes. For Grosz, the chaos of the
big city reflected the amorality of man. His basic attitude was totally pessimistic. By disregarding the laws of perspective,
Grosz’s paintings represented a world falling into pieces. The sexual explicitness in his drawings matched the perverted
knowledge of a precocious youth. Despite his distaste for anything romantic, one cannot fail to notice rather poetic moons
and stars shining above city streets
In 1918 Grosz returned to Berlin even more convinced of society's insanity. At that time he made violently anti-war drawings,
and drawings and paintings attacking the social corruption of Germany, including capitalists, prostitutes, the Prussian military
caste and the middle class.
...He not only depicted victims of the catastrophe of the W.W.I—the disabled, crippled, and mutilated—he also
portrayed the collapse of the capitalist society and its values. His wartime line drawings show him to be a master of caricature.
Georg Ehrenfried Gross was born on 26 July 1893 in Berlin into the family of Karl Ehrenfried Gross, an innkeeper, and his
wife Marie Wilhelmine Luise.. In 1908 he was expelled from school for having returned a trainee teacher's blow.
After passing the entrance exam he began his studies at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden. While in the Academy he specialized
in graphic art and started to co-operate with satirical magazines as early as 1910. In 1912 Grosz (then Gross) joined the
graphic art course at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin. In 1913 he spent several months in Paris at Colarossi's studio.
The main subjects of his drawings of the period are crimes and orgies, erotic subjects; his cartoons find publication in "Ulk",
"Lustige Blätter" and other periodicals. He also did his first book illustrations and began painting in oils.
With the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered, but was discharged from the army several months later following a
surgical operation. During this period in Berlin Gross met various authors, artists and intellectuals, among them those with
whom he would found the Berlin Dada in 1917.
In 1916 the artist in protest against nationalism and patriotism altered his name to George Grosz. The same year he painted
the earliest of his oils known, among them Lovesick and Suicide and a year later he published his first two albums, the "Erste
George Grosz Mappe" and "Kleine Grosz Mappe".
Following the revolution in Russia, an artists' association, the "November Group" was established in Berlin in 1918, and Grosz
joined it, soon after becoming a member of the Communist Party. In 1919, with the publisher Wieland Herzfelde (of Malik Publishing
House), he started a magazine called "Die Pleite", and collaborated with Franz Jung on "Jedermann sein eigener Fussball" (Everybody
his own football) and with John Hoexter and Carl Einstein on "Der blutige Ernst" (The bloody seriousness). His drawings, tartly
critical of bourgeois society, appeared in various Malik publications; the artist also produced portfolios and books, which
regularly aroused scandals.
In 1921 his album "Gott mit uns" (God with us) brought Grosz charges of defaming the Reichswehr (army); in 1924 he was prosecuted
for offences against public morality by his album "Ecce Homo" (the album was confiscated as being pornographic); in 1928 for
his drawing "Shut up and keep serving the cause" he was accused of blasphemy. All these scandals only helped consolidate his
fame.
In 1924 the artist became chairman of the artists' association "Rote Gruppe" (Red Group); until 1927 he was a regular contributor
to Communist publications. In 1928 he was co-founder of the "Association Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands" (German
Association of Revolutionary Artists).
And from the Artchive George Grosz (1893-1959)
-
"Grosz considered himself a propagandist of the social revolution. He not only depicted victims of the catastrophe of the
First World War - the disabled, crippled, and mutilated - he also portrayed the collapse of capitalist society and its values.
His wartime line drawings show him to be a master of caricature. In a 1925 portfolio of prints Grosz ridiculed Hitler by dressing
him in a bearskin, a swastika tattooed on his left arm. Until 1927 he also painted large allegorical paintings that focused
on the plight of Germany; Count Harry Kessler, a leading intellectual and collector, called these 'modern history pictures.'
"Grosz was called by some the 'bright-red art executioner,' and indeed his political radicalism was well known. He had joined
the German Communist party in 1922. Although a trip to Russia later that year disillusioned him, he continued to work with
[radical publisher] Malik Verlag. Feeling out of step with Russia's politics, Grosz resigned from the party in 1923, but the
next year he became a leader of Berlin's Rote Gruppe (Red group), an organization of revolutionary Communist artists that
prefigured the Assoziation revolutionarer bildender Kunstler Deutschlands (ASSO, Association of revolutionary visual artists
of Germany).
"By 1929 the political climate in Germany had shifted to the right, and, at best, Grosz's work was considered anachronistic.
The periodical Kunst und Kunstler (Art and artists) commented...: 'Dix's Barrikade (Barricade) and Grosz's Wintermarchen (Winter
tale) are now curiosities that only have a place in a wax museum, commemorating the revolutionary time. One doesn't make art
with conviction alone.' In a somewhat more positive light, Grosz was described as a historical figure in the periodical Eulenspiegel
in 1931: 'No other German artist so consciously used art as a weapon in the fight of the German workers during 1919 to 1923
as did George Grosz. He is one of the first artists in Germany who consciously placed art in the service of society. His drawings...are
worthwhile not only in the present but also are documents of proletarian revolutionary art.' These comments were more indicative
of the magazine's editorial stance than the tenor of the times, however. More in keeping with popular sentiment, Deutsche
Kunst und Dekoration (German art and decoration) described Grosz as one-sided and pathological, 'too obstinate, too fanatical,
too hostile to be a descendant of Daumier .' Although according to the magazine's art writer he was a master of form, his
social point of view was wrongly chosen.
"Grosz's reputation as a political activist and deflator of German greatness was no secret. Menacing portents and premonitions
of disaster began to haunt him. A studio assistant appeared in a brown shirt one day and warned him to be careful; a threatening
note calling him a Jew was found beside his easel. A nightmare he recounted in his autobiography ended with a friend shouting
at him 'Why don't you go to America?' When in the spring of 1932 a cable arrived from the Art Students League in New York,
inviting him to teach there during the summer, he accepted immediately. After a short return to Germany, where he was advised
that his apartment and studio had been searched by the Gestapo, who were looking for him, the artist emigrated in January
1933. He became an American citizen in 1938.
"In the meantime Grosz was among the defamed artists whose works had been included in two Schandausstellungen (abomination
exhibitions) in Mannheim and Stuttgart in 1933 In a letter of July 21, 1933, Grosz wrote that he was secretly pleased and
proud about this turn of events, because his inclusion in these exhibitions substantiated the fact that his art had a purpose,
that it was true 9 The polemical articles about modern art, "art on the edge of insanity" as the official Nazi newspaper,
the Volkischer Beobachter called it, also regularly included Grosz, with particular attention paid to his portraiture. A portrait
of Max Hermann-Neisse, later to appear in the exhibition Entartete Kunst, was singled out for the "degenerate loathsomeness
of the subject." A total of 285 of Grosz's works were collected from German institutions; five paintings, two watercolors,
and thirteen graphic works were included in Entartete Kunst.
"Grosz participated in an anti-Axis demonstration in New York in 1940 and revealed his reaction to the Führer in an interview
with Rundfunk Radio in 1958:
"When Hitler came, the feeling came over me like that of a boxer; I felt as if I had lost. All our efforts were for nothing."
"Grosz returned to Germany permanently in 1958, somewhat disillusioned with his American interlude. He had wanted a new beginning
and had tried to deny his political and artistic past, but he was appreciated in America primarily as a satirist, and the
work from the period after the First World War was perceived as his best. The biting commentary that marked this early work
was that of a misanthropic pessimist, not what he had become: an optimist infatuated with the United States. Grosz was unable
to understand the American psyche to the degree that he had the German, and he returned to his homeland in an attempt to regain
the momentum he had lost. He died in Berlin in an accident six weeks after his return."
- From Stephanie Barron, "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany"
PAINTING BY MARC CHAGALL (1889-1985)
" CALVARY " Posted by Hello PAINTING BY MARC CHAGALL (1889-1985)
" DEDICATED TO MY FIANCE " Posted by Hello PAINTING BY MARC CHAGALL (1889-1985)
"THE FIDDLER " Posted by Hello PAINTING BY MARC CHAGALL (1889-1985) " THE POET " Posted by Hello PAINTING BY MARC CHAGALL (1889-1985)
" THE FALLING ANGEL" Posted by Hello
MARC CHAGALL (1889-1985)
Born to a humble Jewish family in the ghetto of a large Belorussian town ,Vitebsk ... Chagall passed a childhood steeped
in Hasidic culture... Studied at a St Petersburg art school. Returning to Vitebsk, he became engaged to Bella Rosenfeld (whom
he married twelve years later)...
In 1910, with a living allowance provided by a St. Petersburg patron, Chagall went to Paris. After a year and a half in rooms
in Montparnasse, he moved into a studio on the edge of town in the ramshackle settlement for bohemian artists that was known
as La Ruche ("the Beehive"). He met the avant-garde poets Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, and Guillaume Apollinaire, as well as
a number of young painters destined to become famous: the Expressionist Chaim Soutine, the abstract colourist Robert Delaunay,
and the Cubists Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote. In such company nearly every sort of pictorial
audacity was encouraged, and Chagall responded to the stimulus by rapidly developing the poetic and seemingly irrational tendencies
he had begun to display in Russia. At the same time, under the influence of the Impressionist, Postimpressionist, and Fauvist
pictures he saw in Paris museums and commercial galleries, he gave up the usually sombre palette he had employed at home.
... Breton, who admired the 'total lyric explosion' of his pre-war painting, tried to claim him for Surrealism but Chagall
only flirted with it briefly during his exile in New York (1941-48). His emblematic irrationality shook off all outside influences:
colour governed his compositions, calling up chimerical processions of memory where reality and the imaginary are woven into
a single legend, born in Vitebsk and dreamed in Paris. Back in France, Chagall discovered ceramics, sculpture and stained
glass...
Commissions poured in: for the Assy baptistery in 1957, the cathedrals of Metz (1960) and Rheims (1974), the Hebrew University
Medical Centre synagogue in Jerusalem (1960), the Paris Opéra (1963). The Musée Chagall in Nice dedicated to the 'Biblical
Message' set the seal on his fame in July 1973.
See MARK HARDENS ARTCHIVE www.artchive.com & www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ & www.artelino.com/
as usual the website The Art Millennium is essential for further investigation
study perusing & amusing . At www. nelepets.com/art/
Definitions and characterizations of Expressionism
"In all its forms the movement stood out against fascism and this, together with its so called 'degenerate' qualities (it
was anti-Aryan and anti-naturalism) led to the persecution of many Expressionist artists under the Nazi regime."
In the north of Europe, the Fauves' celebration of color was pushed to new emotional and psychological depths. Expressionism,
as it was generally known, developed almost simultaneously in different countries from about 1905. Characterized by heightened,
symbolic colors and exaggerated imagery, it was German Expressionism in particular that tended to dwell on the darker, sinister
aspects of the human psyche.
The term ``Expressionism'' can be used to describe various art forms but, in its broadest sense, it is used to describe any
art that raises subjective feelings above objective observations. The paintings aim to reflect the artists's state of mind
rather than the reality of the external world. The German Expressionist movement began in 1905 with artists such as Kirchner
and Nolde, who favored the Fauvist style of bright colors but also added stronger linear effects and harsher outlines.
Although Expressionism developed a distinctly German character, the Frenchman, Georges Rouault (1871-1958), links the decorative
effects of Fauvism in France with the symbolic color of German Expressionism. Rouault trained with Matisse at Moreau's academy
and exhibited with the Fauves, but his palette of colors and profound subject matter place him as an early, if isolated Expressionist.
His work has been described as ``Fauvism with dark glasses''.
Rouault was a deeply religious man and some consider him the greatest religious artist of the 20th century. He began his career
apprenticed to a stained-glass worker, and his love of harsh, binding outlines containing a radiance of color gives poignancy
to his paintings of whores and fools. He himself does not judge them, though the terrible compassion with which he shows his
wretched figures makes a powerful impression: Prostitute at Her Mirror (1906; 70 x 60 cm (27 1/2 x 23 1/2 in)) is a savage
indictment of human cruelty. She is a travesty of feminity, although poverty drives her still to prink miserably before her
mirror in the hope of work. Yet the picture does not depress, but holds out hope of redemption. Strangely enough, this work
is for Rouault-- if not exactly a religious picture-- at least a profoundly moral one. She is a sad female version of his
tortured Christs, a figure mocked and scorned, held in disrepute.
The bridge to the future
Die Brücke (The Bridge) was the first of two Expressionist movements that emerged in Germany in the early decades of the 20th
century. In 1905 a group of German Expressionist artists came together in Dresden and took that name chosen by Schmidt-Rottluff
to indicate their faith in the art of the future, towards which their work would serve as a bridge. In practice they were
not a cohesive group, and their art became an angst-ridden type of Expressionism. The achievement that had the most lasting
value was their revival of graphic arts, in particular, the woodcut using bold and simplified forms.
The artists of Die Brücke drew inspiration from van Gogh, Gauguin and primitive art. Munch was also a strong influence, having
exhibited his art in Berlin from 1892. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), the leading spirit of Die Brücke, wanted German
art to be a bridge to the future. He insisted that the group, which included Erich Heckel (1883-1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluf
(1884-1976), ``express inner convictions... with sincerity and spontaneity''.
Even at their wildest, the Fauves had retained a sense of harmony and design, but Die Brücke abandoned such restraint. They
used images of the modern city to convey a hostile, alienating world, with distorted figures and colors. Kirchner does just
this in Berlin Street Scene (1913; 121 x 95 cm (47 1/2 x 37 1/2 in)), where the shrill colors and jagged hysteria of his own
vision flash forth uneasily. There is a powerful sense of violence, contained with difficulty, in much of their art. Emil
Nolde (1867-1956), briefly associated with Die Brücke, was a more profound Expressionist who worked in isolation for much
of his career. His interest in primitive art and sensual color led him to paint some remarkable pictures with dynamic energy,
simple rhythms, and visual tension. He could even illuminate the marshes of his native Germany with dramatic clashes of stunning
color. Yet Early Evening (1916; 74 x 101 cm (29 x 39 1/2 in)) is not mere drama: light glimmers over the distance with an
exhilarating sense of space.
EXPRESSIONISM
KEY DATES: 1905-1925
A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature
of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour,
agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine
arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.
Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective
emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism,
and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism
is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal,
spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose
the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality
his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and
forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and
according to idea and human critics.
Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought
of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.
The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch
are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.
Expressionism - (with a capital E — the more specific sense) An art movement dominant in Germany from 1905-1925, especially
Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, which are usually referred to as German Expressionism, anticipated by Francisco de Goya y
Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828), Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890), Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) and others.
Expressionism ( - From The Bulfinch Guide to Art History )
A term first used at the 1911 Fauvist and Cubist exhibition in Berlin.
It describes art which distorts reality through
exaggeration, vigorous and visible brushwork and strong colour, in order to express an artist's ideas or emotions. Although
these tendencies are apparent in art before the 20th century, particularly that of Northern Europe (Grünewald), the term is
primarily associated with the German groups, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, with post First World War German art and to
a lesser extent with the Fauves in France. There were also a number of individuals, working at the same period, who are commonly
linked to the movement, including Kokoschka, Rouault, Soutine and Schiele. These artists opposed the naturalism of the Impressionists
but were inspired by van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Ensor and others. They were among the first to appreciate
non-European and primitive art forms and also looked to the folk art of their own countries in the belief that spontaneity
of feeling was greatest where intellect and training were least.
This exploration led to a strong spiritual element
in the work of many Expressionists such as Kandinsky, Rouault and Nolde. It also encouraged an interest in graphic art, particularly
woodcuts (Barlach). Despite their links with the past, Expressionists were at the forefront of modernist developments in painting:
artists like Marc and Feininger incorporated Cubist elements into their work and Kandinsky produced early examples of abstraction.
But their sympathies, as reflected in their subject matter, were anti-modernist: the industrial city was a place of danger
and immorality, the First World War was a personal and international disaster, politics, especially in postwar Germany were
corrupt. For some, this state of affairs led to escapism into landscape or a discovery of the self, others experienced an
alienation akin to that expressed by Dada (Grosz) and later by the Abstract Expressionists. Expressionism has continued to
be influential in later 20th century art (Baselitz).
Expressionism was not purely associated with two-dimensional art. Sculptors such as Barlach, Lehmbruck and Kollwitz were motivated
by aims similar to those of Expressionist painters. In architecture the language of internationalism was strained and distorted
by Mendelsohn, Steiner and in some works by Behrens and Mies van der Rohe. Bertolt Brecht, Sean O'Casey and Franz Kafka also
explored comparable ideas in literature.
In all its forms the movement stood out against fascism and this, together
with its so called 'degenerate' qualities (it was anti-Aryan and anti-naturalism) led to the persecution of many Expressionist
artists under the Nazi regime.
