Word: expressionist
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Some background on the show's sources helps explain its weirdness. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is based on a silent 1920 German Expressionist film of the same name about a mysterious hypnotist who enters a German town and causes all manner of horror and havoc. The film, in turn, draws upon the work of a curious theater of the time based in Paris called the Grand Guignol. For over six decades, the Guignol produced plays resembling a grotesque puppet show, but with live actors. Real-life crime and bawdiness were brought to the stage for elite audiences craving campy...
...much larger than a playing card. At that palm-size scale the solid world starts to dematerialize. Trees in the mist become twigs. Grasses reflected in water, as in his early picture Detroit, look like not fully legible scribbles of some force behind creation. Callahan shared with the Abstract Expressionist painters a penchant for the sublime, but he worked toward it from a different direction. They preferred wall-size canvases, a match for the presumed immensities of the spiritual realm; he made pictures the size of an intuition...
...classic complaint against abstract art is that it alienates the average viewer. An odd combination of right-wing representationalists, left-wing socialist realists and bewildered museum-goers have long criticized the minimalist and expressionist pieces that dominated the art scene within the U.S. in the mid-20th century...
...founded the Germanic Museum in 1903 and turned over a large gift of statues, sculptures and plaster-cast architecture samples to the Museums. Now the Center for European Studies, Busch Hall drew some of the most important Germanic art in all of North America when Bauhaus and Expressionist artists seeking refuge brought their private collections...
Over the years, Kitaj's way of painting has passed from extreme and at times mannered precision (though with "rough" bits of drawing and focus) to a much looser and Expressionist manner. His most recent work is sketchier yet, and some of its tropes seem merely silly-like Western Bathers, 1993-94, a parody of Cazanne's theme but with the figures in cowboy costume around a campfire. Maybe a climactic late style lies on the other side of this interlude, maybe not. In neither case can his work be written...