Tonight's picture was taken in March of 2003. Mattie was 11 months old and in my parent's living room. Mattie saw me approaching with a camera and this caught his attention. He opened his arms out wide. I am not sure whether it was to give me a hug or to reach for the camera, but either case, I captured him in action!
Quote of the day: The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths. ~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
To give you some background on what the whole exhibit was about............................
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism — wave after wave of artistic ideas from Paris broke on Berlin's shores. The show opens with Modern French paintings acquired by collectors and museums in Germany. German artists, understandably tired of not being given the time of day, finally had enough. It's a story familiar to locales outside any powerful center for the production and distribution of important new art.
In 1905, Fritz Bleyl (1880-1966), Erich Heckel (1883-1970),
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) formed
Die Brucke, which means the Bridge, as a Dresden avant-garde painters group with a
mission. Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and Max Pechstein (1881–1955) joined soon
after.
Except for Nolde they were all kids, the oldest barely 25. To
oversimplify a bit, these young German painters kept the French feeling for
color and threw away the rest. Color's irrational, unruly powers, which they
felt were being restrained by stuffy, bourgeois proprieties, were unleashed.
The "bridge" they meant their art to build
stretched from past to present — from the anguished bodily distortions of
medieval Gothic sculpture to the stylish, pleasure-seeking denizens of urban
boulevards; from the great German tradition of carved woodcut prints to the
emotional tensions of convulsive modern experience.
Expressionism, authored by the German art critic Paul Fechter in 1914 and on view in the exhibition. The publication imbued the movement with a national identity, commensurate with the patriotic tone in Germany during World War I.
In reality, Expressionism was born from a shared advance toward modernism among French and German artists as the latest French trends reached Germany through a network of collectors, critics, and art lovers, creating a mutually rich cosmopolitan milieu. Expressionists discovered new artistic possibilities through the first modern masters. They recognized expressive gesture and color in Van Gogh, nascent abstraction in Cézanne, and a new
approach to the decorative in Gauguin and Matisse. Expressionism in Germany and France brings together significant works that Expressionists would have seen and carefully studied in exhibitions and collections of the time throughout Germany as well as Paris. Through a process of give and take, the Expressionists moved toward an international art while also seeking to maintain their national cultural heritage, combining tradition with aesthetic evolution.
Curators Timothy Benson and Frauke Josenhans talk about the exhibition, their research, and the impact of avant garde art being shown in France and Germany in the early 20th century: http://www.lacma.org/expressionism#video
Van Gogh painted this piece while living in Paris. This painting was quite unique and shows a very different style than we are accustomed to seeing, with Van Gogh's other works...... which usually feature heavy brush strokes, vibrant colors, and swirling patterns!
These are woodcuts that depict the Expressionist period, evoking the pure emotion of inner turmoil and fear! The expressionist movement was designed to be a sharp contrast to impressionism! Who painted from perspective of what they saw in their environment, rather than what they felt from inside!
This exhibit was enormous in size and displayed various works, which is what I am trying to show you through my photographs. I wasn't allowed to photograph many of the works on display. But hopefully the ones that I did capture, you can get the feeling for the vast array of genres here! The exhibit covered 14 years of art! This painting I share, through a power point slide show, with my kindergartner class every spring, so it was delightful to see it in person! That was a first for me. I know quite well that Matisse is the father of the Fauvism movement. Meaning that he believed in using vibrant and rich colors, but in imaginative ways. The colors did not have to be realistic. A banana did not have to be yellow for example, it could be however one imagined or wanted it to be. Which is why in this "open window" Matisse saw the ocean as pink and the sky as purple. Why not? On some days, given our mood, it may look and feel that way to us.
Starting in 1908, Kandinsky began spending his summers in the Alpine village of Murnau. In this mountain village with its intense sunlight and deep shadows his painting style underwent a revolution. During a recent trip to Paris he discovered the style of fauvism, and it was at Murnau, that he began to perfect his own use of that style with flattened forms and vibrant colors.
Another painting group formed in Germany besides the Brucke (the bridge). They were called Blaue Reiter (or Blue Rider). They formed because people like Kandinsky were being ostracized and his paintings were being rejected from exhibition. Blue rider believed art had a spiritual dimension and the spiritual dimension many times was connected to animals. In fact, horses and riders were very much an important motif. As Marc's painting depicts. Marc was one of the founders of the Rider movement along with Kandinsky.
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