Word: expressionist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...culture they try to construct withers in the red glare of National Socialism. After 1933 their story becomes a lugubrious tale of giants in exile (Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckmann), of ruined hope, lopped lives and rampant state philistinism. By 1945 there is no life left in the expressionist impulse, at least in Germany; it can only be reborn in America as abstraction, and then re-exported to exhausted Europe. By 1955 figurative expressionism is a dodo--shot by Hitler, eaten by art history, its bones a museum specimen. Thus spake, until lately, the scenario...
...major figures in prewar expressionism--Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff --are here at full stretch, with works that have rarely or never been seen outside Germany. It would be hard, for instance, to find a better epitome of the expressionist vision of relationships between humans and nature than Kirchner's Striding into the Sea, 1912, with its naked lovers swept up in a kind of decorative pantheism, at one with the flouncing breakers and sharply writhing sand dunes of the Baltic shore...
...museum has ever mounted a better anthology of early German modernism. One sees all the parts of the expressionist project of inoculating the 20th century against its own creeping materialism, an aim that cast itself, in large ecstatic terms, as the liberation of the repressed self from the bonds of history and convention. The idea that painting could do this was one of the reigning ideals of early modern art; today it is hardly more than sales talk. But when Max Beckmann declared that he wanted his paintings to "accuse God of everything he has done wrong," he meant just...
...Richard Oelze's spectral streetscapes or even late Max Ernst, let alone the sensitive but essentially academic abstractions by Willi Baumeister or Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Such things seem included as tunings-up for what the organizers of the exhibition evidently consider their orchestral climax, the reappearance of the expressionist mainstream...
...avid following as perhaps America's foremost active playwright, critics sensed in his plays a compulsive urge toward violence, a lack of compassion, a reveling in the bizarre. His comic scenes made viewers wonder whether he was laughing with or at his characters. His work has shifted from expressionist flights of fancy to a kind of grim, weird naturalism and has tended more and more to portray families as the poisoned wellspring of human evil. He has brought to life the same fumbling, feckless dreamers from the heartland that Tennessee Williams did and, like Williams, has shown a special sensitivity...