For the first time at this exhibition of the Rhenish Expressionists, trends that had been observed earlier in Berlin and Munich were also seen in the Rhineland. This was because a generation of artists was emerging with ideas from the European renewal, namely, Early Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, melding these into a unified and overarching way of painting that they wanted to develop further from the old into a new continuing unity. The rather carefully worded statement concerning this Rhenish art was formulated by the Cologne art critic, painter and writer, Rudi Mense: The common goal of these artists was ‘to capture the secretive and rather mysterious language of things and to hold the inner light of the world, its melodious meaning and its ringing existence and to approximate this in a painting.’ Max Ernst reported later: ‘We were joined by a thirst for life, poetry, freedom, the pursuit of the absolute, for knowledge.’
Heinrich Campendonk, In the Forest, c. 1919.
Oil on canvas, 83.8 × 99 cm. Gift of Robert H. Tannahill, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
August Macke belonged to the German painters who, shortly after 1910, struggled not only theoretically, but also from the artistic point of view, with the artistic trends of their day. Macke recognised that ‘All these things, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and abstract painting are just terms for the change that we want our artistic thinking to make and is making.’ This he intuitively understood and was the basis for his further development. They were Impressionism, specifically George Seurat and the linear rhythm; the colour panes of Robert Delaunay and movement through colour; as well as Futurism, of which he thought: ‘Contemporary painting can avoid this idea even less than Picasso.’
In the autumn of 1912, Macke, together with Franz Marc, visited Robert Delaunay in Paris, who then in January together with Apollinaire came to Bonn for a return visit. In March 1913, Delaunay exhibited a larger number of his works in Cologne. Macke was impressed most of all by Fenètres.
Already in Paris, I had the feeling that I had before me some very significant things. …My heart opens up when I see the houses and the Eiffel Tower through these windows with sunlight shinning through them… I almost always think about this. The reflecting windowpanes through which on a sunny day one can see the city and the Eiffel Tower.
Simultaneity was the magic word of the movement then. Man and his surroundings were the main subjects for Macke’s paintings. In particular, it is the youthful elegance of women, who in the world of his paintings are composed of rhythm, movement, and reflections. He used variations of the doubling principle associated with the Futurists Balla and Russolo in his scenes. He also used Boccioni’s technique for visualising the invisible and Ardengo Soffici’s method of depicting acoustic components with dots.
Heinrich Campendonk was a friend of August Macke and Franz Marc. His landscape depictions during his most creative period culminate in spatial and temporal simultaneity of varying impressions and sequences into a characterisation of landscape and action. Animals and vegetation, buildings and objects stand in close relationship to one another and are connected and pervaded by an atmospheric network rendered visible. Everything is combined and is not defined by either shape or colour. Coloured bands of oscillation pass through and enliven the painting surface. Similar to Franz Marc, Campendonk also frees colour from the dependency of the visible and assigns to it values of its own.
Paul Adolf Seehaus who was Macke’s only student, also belonged to the circle of artists. He had a natural rhythm, and he felt himself obliged to the organic world, to the countryside and the architecture placed in it.
‘It is all about the contrast,’ he wrote in an essay shortly before his death in 1919, ‘not about what has been seen, but rather what has been experienced – it is out of this that the painter must express himself. Only in this way can he feel the rhythm of things, only in this way can he make seen to people, only in this way will he become a praiseworthy prophet.’
His biographer K. F. Ertel commented: ‘It is as if felt the pulse of nature, both turbulent and calm.’
It was the desire of Wilhelm Morgner to express himself entirely free of nature by only using colour and brush strokes to indicate direction. In 1912 he painted Ornamental Compositions in several variations. They are constructed in groups of combined shapes. Morgner makes use of harmoniously curved lines. These indicate direction and suggest movement. ‘The manner in which the lines are given is supposed to be the ongoing waving of my ego, like an echo that is created by some instrument and then continues the same wave in the air, as the instrument has given it,’ Morgner wrote in 1911.
August Macke, In Front of the Hat Shop, 1913.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 44 cm. Private collection.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 243.9 × 233.7 cm. Acquired through the
Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Georges Braque, Workshop II, 1949. Oil on canvas, 131 × 163 cm.
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Cubism, Materiality, and Collage
In 1907 one painting signalled the prelude to a change in painting: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. When Pablo Picasso first exhibited this bordello scene with five female figures, even the collector Sergei Shchukin and his friend Georges Braque considered the painting to be ‘a loss for French painting.’ However, the significance of this new view of reality soon became clear to Braque. For the first time Picasso crafted a clear and rational lens without any aesthetic allusions. Continuing with the analysis of shape by Cézanne, Picasso fragmented the forms into cubes. It was the task of the viewer to put this puzzle of various spatial views together into a whole. The colour was muted. This was also new. However, most of all the novelty lay in the independence of the painting from the preconditions given by nature. At the same time, this was the artist’s answer to the changed preconditions of science regarding space and time. Cézanne’s demand that in nature one should seek out the sphere, the cone and the cylinder was the basis for his compositional ideas. At the 1909 exhibition of the Indépendents, the critic Louis de Vauxcelles spoke of cubes. Cubism was born.
Cubism underwent many evolutionary steps. The friends Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso said later: ‘We did not have the intention of creating Cubism. Moreover, we just wanted to express that which moved us… It almost seemed as if we were two mountain climbers who were hanging from a single rope.’ In the years 1909 to 1912, they brought art the independence from everything real without being completely abstract. This phase is called Analytical Cubism. In particular, they now painted figures and still lifes. They no longer painted an object viewed from one point, but layered these in order to capture the view from all sides. They analyzed the object and brought it to the canvas as a fragmented picture. Shape and space melted into one another in one structure of enmeshed, intersected and dissected surfaces. Instead of volume, one constructed surfaces. The situation captured in the painting became far more indefinite. Some surfaces became transparent, weightless or suddenly transformed themselves into a book or an instrument. With regard to colours, one limited oneself to a brown-gray-blue colour scale. They no longer painted in open nature, but in the studio, where the arsenal for their subjects was already at hand. Later, they no longer arranged their still lifes; rather, they created them out of the imagination, adding numbers and word fragments to the compositions.
In Synthetic Cubism, now accompanied by Juan Gris, they both achieved their artistic goals. It was no longer about taking the objects apart. Now, one created new objects with new materials. One recognised new qualities for works of art, using the most varied materials, even items that were to be thrown away. The collage was made into