Word: expressionistic
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...scenes and alienated clowns (Nijinsky as Petrouchka, done from an old photograph, was a favorite image) were seen, if at all, as a mere prelude to his abstract work. They did not look as "interesting" as the early work of his colleagues because Kline was the only abstract expressionist not touched by surrealism. He painted as though he had never seen a Miro. And so Franz Josef Kline, named by his Pennsylvania saloonkeeper father after the Austrian Emperor, is mainly remembered for a decade's worth of paintings: the stark abstractions, composed of thick bars, props and vectors of black...
...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...