Expressionists of the Early 20th
Century
“Look Within”
George Grosz, The
Hero, c. 1936,
lithograph.
My Drawings expressed my despair,
hate and disillusionment, I drew
drunkards; puking men; men with
clenched fists cursing at the moon. . . .
I drew a man, face filled with fright,
washing blood from his hands. . . I
drew lonely little men fleeing madly
through empty streets. I drew a crosssection of tenement house: through
one window could be seen a man
attacking his wife; through another,
two people making love; from a third
hung a suicide with body covered by
swarming flies. I drew soldiers without
noses; war cripples with crustaceanlike steel arms; two medical soldiers
putting a violent infantryman into a
strait-jacket made of a horse blanket. .
. I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit
being examined for military duty. I also
wrote poetry. –Grosz
Republican Automation by
George Grosz, 1920.
Watercolor and pencil on
paper, 23.5” x 18.5”. MoMA
My aim is to be understood by
everyone. I reject the 'depth' that
people demand nowadays, into which
you can never descend without a
diving bell crammed with cabbalistic
bullshit and intellectual metaphysics.
This expressionistic anarchy has got to
stop... A day will come when the artist
will no longer be this bohemian,
puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man
working in clarity within a collectivist
society. -Grosz
Max Beckmann
• See wikipaintings
Die Brucke
*associated with the idea of
primitivism
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin,
1913, oil on canvas, MoMA
Independent
Kathe Kollwitz, The Outbreak
(from the Peasants War
Series), 1903, etching
Der Blaue Reiter
(The Blue Rider)
Vasily Kandinsky, Composition
VII, 1913, oil on canvas
Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses,
1911, oil on canvas
Emil Nolde
Mask Still Life III, 1911, oil
on canvas