This thrilling impression of the German village Dangast was painted in 1910 by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976). He was one of the founding members of a group of Dresden artists, along with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, who named themselves Die Brücke (The Bridge). The Brücke artists believed that art needed to develop itself into a more ‘youthful’ direction. They opposed the older generation who, to their taste, only made ‘bourgeois’ art. Together with Der Blaue Reiter, a somewhat later group from Munich, they laid the foundations for a movement that would be called Expressionism.
The Expressionists strove for the ‘unspoiled natural,’ art freed from academic restrictions. Inspired by authors such as Nietzsche, Ibsen and Strindberg, and painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin, they wanted to convert reality into a ‘visual character.’ Unlike the Impressionists, their primary purpose was not pure perception, but a psychologization of the perceived impression.
This aim for individuality und pureness also affected their way of working. The Expressionist artists liked to work in natural surroundings, away from the negative effects of industrialization. Furthermore, they started to mix their own individual colors and thinned their paint with petroleum, so that they were able to create smoother strokes and had more freedom in their working method.
Schmidt-Rottluff’s painting of Dangas, a Northern-German spa town where he spent half of the year, is a typical example of these new insights. Natural colors have been neglected in favor of shrill, aggressive, contrasting color planes of blue, yellow and green. The rhythmically applied patches of paint lend a restless movement to the whole landscape. Rather than being an accurate description of a village scene, Schmidt-Rottluff represented his inner state.
The unrestrained style and psychological approach of Expressionist was not appreciated by all: in 1937, the Nazis declared their works Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) and a large number of their paintings and sculptures were destroyed.
(text: Maarten Levendig)
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