Expressionism

Not the world as seen, but the world as felt. Anxiety, isolation: painters put them straight onto the canvas through twisted lines and raw color, and in an age of cities and war, painting became a record of the mind. Two groups anchor this in Germany: Brücke (Bridge), founded in Dresden in 1905 by architecture students, and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), started in Munich in 1911 by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Munch's The Scream exists in several versions, oil, tempera, pastel, print, now held apart from each other, across the National Museum in Oslo, the Munch Museum, and elsewhere. This band has a heavy sequel. On 19 July 1937 the Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich. Some 650 works confiscated from museums across Germany were crammed into dim rooms, with abusive captions beside them and the prices the museums had paid displayed alongside — to show the waste of public money. The styles denounced included not only Expressionism but Impressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Fauvism and the Bauhaus. A good deal of this map was on that list. The irony was the attendance. The approved Great German Art Exhibition, running at the same time, drew less than a quarter of the crowd. The show built to humiliate became the best-attended exhibition of modern art of its time: more than three million people came to see the pictures that had been hung there to be sneered at.