Expressionism

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Giorgio Seveso

Brücke in German means “bridge”, and it was a bridge between arts and sensitiveness of young generations, a bridge to the future that four architecture students in their twenties wanted to build in Dresden in 1905. The original core of this association included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Herich Heckel and Fritz Bleyl; later, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, the Swiss Cuno Amiet and Otto Mueller also joined the group.
Autodidact in painting, the four young people shared the desire to realize a dream: to subvert all values and relationships within the artistic culture of their age, fighting with tradition and academism. The birth of the group marks the beginning, for German and European painting, of the great poetic and stylistic story of expressionism, which was substantially parallel and contemporary to the origin of fauves in France (Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, Braque, Dufy and others.
What Kirchner shared with his companions, which marked the success of the new expressive trend among critics and mainly the public was above all the impulse to destroy all old rules in favour of spontaneity of inspiration, just like fauves, everyone through his personality. On the other hand, their intuition became part of the cultural heritage of our century, paving the way to contemporary art as we know today, free from all ties and trammels represented by academic rules.
“The painter”, Kirchner wrote in those years, “turns the idea of his experience into a work of art. He learns to use his means through constant practice. There are no set rules for that. Rules concerning a single work form during its creation, through the creator's personality, his technique and the assumption he has conceived...The instinctive sublimation of the form during the sensible event is expressed on impulse on the plane.” All that means destroying all rules that could hinder a fluid manifestation of immediate inspiration. This is one of the cornerstones of expressionism: intolerance for all rules and regulations to follow the emotional pressures of one's being.
Due to this, their painting is almost never pleasant, hedonistic, brilliant: on the contrary, it always has some clashing, hybrid and sometimes even rough aspects. All that can be easily seen in the wide exhibition organized by Fondazione Mazzotta together with the Brücke Museum of Berlin.
Looking at these paintings and sheets (drawings, engravings, serigraphs, xylographs)which show anxious and flashing images, painfully strained, it is indeed evident how for these painters the tension of contents is always more important than the worry for formal perfection, for beauty in itself.
Among the various works exhibited, Kirchner's works are the most impressive ones. With his sharp and vibrant style, the group founder is the artist who creates a really new image with original representativeness.
He is above all the poet of the town, of artificial life, of streets and tabarins. His mark is a thick sequence of jerks, nearly the result of imperceptible nervous releases. His cocottes and his men strolling have a puppet-like mechanicalness, they are rigid, like robots, but they are however characterized by an unnatural, mysterious tension of extraordinary energy and appeal.