Art Movements: Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, Expressionism

Compounding the problems of affixing a singular name to any art movement is the fact that each of these innovations, or stylistic changes occur at the same time and count the same names over a few decade period. Moving from Impressionism to full on abstraction didn’t take too long. But the endless and divisive separation of approaches apparently warranted a litany of genre names.

By the time Expressionism had been totally disseminated, replicated and plundered, its main adherents and the figures directly influencing those folks had been affiliated with any number of art strains dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Die Brücke, perhaps best known for its stark woodcuts by folks like Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, began a transformative process that would eventually affect not just the visual art world, but film as well.

Having that indefinable, but often joked about, German-ness moved from these angular prints detailing a face in a moment in time to the work of Fritz Lang (M) and Robert Wiene (The Cabinent of Dr. Caligari). Those films eventually formed the basis of film noir, which was exported to the States during World War II when directors fled Germany when the Nazi Party came to power. But all of that occurred after Die Brücke – and Der Blaue Reiter.

This movement, coming on the heels of Die Brücke, is commonly figured with Wassily Kandinsky at the forefront. The artists associated with this particular movement didn’t deal with imagery as start as its immediate forbearers, but unquestionably moved more closely to total abstraction.

Kandinsky began using any shape to represent what he saw in nature, in the city or just in his gaze. Landscapes became an assemblage of brightly painted, interrelated shapes. This distance from representational art is less associated with primitive art (Die Brücke being more closely associated), but still apes a sort of abandon and lack of concern regarding then current trends and expectations. The first decade (or two) of the twentieth century, though, would wind up gifting the world with some of the century’s most important works.

Expressionism, perhaps beginning before and ending after these last two stylistic achievements, has come to mean much less than either Die Brücke or Der Blaue Reiter by dint of its expansive sway over the 20^th century. It encompassed both, but also included writers, filmmakers and any number of other art minded creators. Expressionism’s import, though, can’t be overstated.