Oil on cardboard, 98 × 69 cm. Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf.
Explosive Visual Language
Some painters also expressed themselves in an explosive and chaotic manner. Now the inner world of the imagination and the horrific experiences were visually exorcised with enthusiasm and emphasis. This occurred as a conscious reaction, as a sort of accusation, laced with irony and despair. Contemporary issues were treated with the greatest drama and dynamic tension, and brought together in a critically explosive mixture.
The works of Otto Dix and George Grosz from the years 1914 to 1918 bubbled over with chaotic dynamism and omnipresent stimulation. They are examples of an immense discharge of energy, anger, and inner tension. In the painting The War from 1914, Otto Dix vented his aggression with a vehement use of the brush.
In 1914, George Grosz was called up for active duty and discharged in 1916 because of illness. However, in 1917 he was once again called to military service. As Grosz explained:
The breather was a fruitful time in my life, both realistically and romantically. My favourite colours were deep red and blackish blue. I felt the earth upon which I stood shake, and this shaking became visible in my paintings and watercolours.
In his autobiography, published in 1955, A Little Yes and a Big No, he states: ‘Then, my art was a kind of valve – a valve from which the pent up hot steam was let out.’ In 1916–1917, Grosz painted The Funeral (Dedication to Oskar Panizza). ‘On a black coffin, death rides through the milling masses of human faces and grimaces, crying shrilly and calling in vain.’ (Grosz). His view of the big city life was apocalyptic. ‘There is something cosmic about it, perhaps something meteor-like… Metro railway cars rush, as if a thunderstorm trembling, lightening fast they enter and are gone,’ so his works were described by his friend, the poet Theodor Däubler.
George Grosz, Dedication to Oskar Panizza, 1917–1918.
Oil on canvas, 140 × 110 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.
George Grosz, Republican Automaton, 1920.
Watercolour, ink and Indian ink on cardboard, 60 × 47.3 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, The General, 1917.
Oil on canvas, 130 × 105 cm. Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn.
Veristic Tendencies
Germany, a Winter’s Tale, named after Heinrich Heine’s work, was painted by George Grosz after his return from military service in 1918. At that time, Grosz was of the opinion that art that did not put itself at the disposal of the political struggle was meaningless.
‘My art,’ so he wrote in his memoirs, ‘should be a rifle and a sabre… In the middle, I placed the everlasting German, fat and frightened at a slightly wobbly little table with a cigar and a morning paper. Beneath, I depicted the three pillars of society: church, school, military. The man held desperately to the knife and fork; the world shook around him; a sailor, as a symbol of the revolution, and a prostitute completed my view of the times back then.’
A few months before in 1917, his friend, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen had completed perhaps the most significant antimilitarist painting of his time, The General. With smoothly styled cinematic cruelty, Davringhausen depicted the catastrophic state of the war. He eagerly depicted the details with exacting precision. The glowing colourful splendour underscored the heated atmosphere bursting with tension. A collage-like simultaneity of places and conditions organise the divergent scenes into a unified context. Using simultaneity to convey a message goes back to the Futurists; the infantilism is drawn from the sources of the ‘primitives’. It is a completely new way of defining an image. It is consciously alienated from the aesthetical preconceptions and, thereby, it is impossible to ignore its contemporary references.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Worrying Muse, 1916.
Oil on canvas, 97 × 66 cm. Gianni Mattioli collection, Milan.
Surreal and Magical: Between the World Wars
Pittura Metafisica
In order for a work of art to be truly eternal, it must transcend the boundaries of humanity. Good common sense and logical thinking do not apply. The artist must bring forth a truly deep work from the most remote depths of his being. There, no rushing rivers, no birdsong, and no rustling leaves can reach.
The Italian, Giorgio de Chirico, put down these thoughts in 1914. It was at this time that he began to discover the world of painting called Pittura Metafisica. The path that led him here took from 1911 to 1919, and, from 1917, Carlo Carrà followed it as well. They met in January 1917 at a military hospital at Ferrara. They had already heard of one another. Carrà was among the leading Futurists, and de Chirico had been counted by Apollinaire among the most astonishing painters of the younger generation. The poet Alberto Savinio, the brother of de Chirico, was at the same hospital in Ferrara. He wrote a sort of fantasy literature that was close to Kafka and Kubin. They named their new artistic style, Pittura Metafisica. A short time later, Giorgio Morandi joined them.
These three representatives of this artistic style, which, next to Futurism, was the most significant Italian contribution to art in the first half of the 20th century, referenced the tradition of the great Italian masters. They did not want to create a new form of painting, but rather create a new vantage point for seeing things. The tangible world of experience had been changed under new conditions. These artists needed to redefine the basic laws of the classical: a spatially expansive perspective, as was customary in the Renaissance and Baroque; architecture as a backdrop, as it is to be found in the works of Giotto or Piero della Francesca; an austere language of shapes that praises the great, the exalted, and the everlasting. These young Italians were transferring these precepts to a new age, an age whose spirit and atmosphere stood in complete contrast to those of the classical era.
Giorgio de Chirico had studied at the Munich Academy of Art, where he had become acquainted with Max Klinger. The art of Bröcklin and the philosophy of Nietzsche impressed him. In his younger years, he began to paint a sort of ‘unconscious’ paintings in which the elements in a painting were brought together in unusual combinations. He lived in Paris from 1911 to 1915. In 1925 he returned there. He brought the aspect of the unconscious and counter-reality into Pittura Metafisica after 1916. This exercised a lasting influence upon the Surrealists.
The goal of Pittura Metafisica was, according to de Chirico, ‘to construct a new metaphysical psychology through painting.’ In 1919 he wrote down his thoughts:
Almost everything has two aspects: There is the normal aspect that we almost always see. Then, there is the ghostly, metaphysical one that rare individuals might see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. A work of art must speak poetically about something that is far away from the figures and objects, as well as what its material shapes conceals them from us.
An oppressive silence prevails in the paintings of de Chirico. Empty squares, streets without people – there are no living beings, no vegetation, only decoration. The figures appear artificial and unreal, as do the architectural elements; a faceless anonymity reigns in the paintings. The figures and architectural elements are artificially extended in height or length and have enormous shadows. The monumentality of the decorations appears to extend into the infinite. All elements are bound into an overdrawn and overextended central perspective, into a reference system that seems to be directed by an unseen force secretly at work. It is a metaphysical painting style bordering on the unconscious, where the outsized becomes real, what in daily life is not possible becomes possible.
It is the peace and the nonsensical beauty of the painting that appears metaphysical to me. And