Skip to main content

The German Revolution: Expressionist Prints

Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow until August 25th
Four stars

In the beginning was the woodcut. So said art historian Gustav Hartlaub in his Die neue Deutsche Grafik volume in 1920. It’s a suitably dramatic epithet immortalised at the start of this major retrospective of an era-defining burst of energy that captured the disaffected and ever so slightly lost spirit of a defeated Germany following the First World War and the failed revolution of 1918-19. The products of the cultural coup it prompted and gathered here are the result.

With multiple editions now possible beyond painting, the more democratised artform of woodcuts and lithographs were disseminated with the last-gasp urgency of something subversive being passed around in the after-hours shadows of the short-lived Weimar republic.

Gathered together largely from the Hunterian’s own collection, it’s a black and white world that is occupied here behind the monumental headings of each section. ‘LOVE AND ANXIETY’; ‘A BRIDGE TO UTOPIA’; ‘CONFLICT AND DESPAIR. The stakes are high, the drama intense.

The only brighter colours come in two works by Austrian painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky that predate her tutelage under one of expressionism’s unwilling figureheads, Max Beckmann, and an exhibition poster by Gabriele Munter. Even these seem pale and washed-out by the societal sickness that rumbles throughout much of the work on show by the likes of Beckmann and Otto Dix.

Any exhibition of expressionism wouldn’t be a show without Munch, and there are other familiar names, including Picasso, Goya and Gauguin. There is even a fleeting appearance by an on-the-make Egon Schiele.

A stark sombreness pervades throughout. Figures are all angles, their faces blank or else pinched and flint-eyed, their body language contorted, so razor-sharp elbows jut out like weapons hiding in plain sight. It’s as if survivors of the Great War had come stumbling onto the streets, shell-shocked after the blast, but the damage already done in a world set to explode once more in a fervour of political, moral and sexual taboo-busting.

In their messy immediacy, some of the publications archived here are almost punk in execution, as, finally, we get straight to ‘HELL’, Beckmann’s twelve-print cycle of ‘impressively grim’ images of the collective fallout.

As darkly incendiary as this mix of emotional nihilism, existential dread and oppositionist provocation might have been, like all revolutions, it was never going to last. Soon the soul-baring howls would be silenced, and much here would be deemed degenerate. The storm clouds may have already been gathering, but for a fleeting moment, the expressionist revolution could vent its spleen beneath them. 

Scottish Art News, May 2019.

ends



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more