Expresionismo. Una revolución artística alemana.

The German expressionists were uncomfortable, rabid … Emerged in the early twentieth century, charged against Christian and bourgeois values, but also against uncontrolled industrialization in the cities. Anti-imperialists, were dispersed, shattered and depleted with the horrors of World War I, and joined forces only to be annihilated by the Nazis in the Degenerate Art show in 1937. In this very complete work by TASCHEN, Dietmar Elger, director of the Gerhard Archive Richter, brings together the many artists and elements of this complex movement, dispersed and exalted in a rigorous study of its protagonists, their concepts and their influence within the Modern Movement of the twentieth century. Balanced and critical amid the frenzy of color and distortion, the book reveals the characteristics of the main groups of expressionism, the Bridge (Die Brücke) and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), and their regional variants, of the nerve centers of Berlin and Munich, but also from northern Germany, Rhineland and Vienna. Stylistic options and themes chosen by the members of this dispersed group of artists who dealt with modern industrial reality are compared and contrasted. We find from the luminous rays of Wassily Kandinksy or the pastel tones of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the futuristic facets of Franz Marc and the impressionist atavism in the strident colors of Emil Nolde. We stumbled upon old men in sordid bars and then we entered a claustrophobic yellow room with an embarrassing naked young woman. We will be overwhelmed by a cacophony of urban sounds and fumes and then find ourselves alone in the forest, near a lake and in silence.With all the richness and scope of expressionist production, Elger not only presents frontline artists, such as Beckmann, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde and Schiele, but also other less studied creators, such as Conrad Felixmüller, Ludwig Meidner and Marianne von Werefkin. The result is a rigorous, immersive and comprehensive compendium of a vivid, often even violent, expression mode, and of the longing and restlessness hidden behind his frantic painting.