Also available in: Italian
In Genoa, in the Doge’s Palazzo Ducale, is an exhibition “From Kirchner to Nolde. German Expressionism 1905-1913″, open from March 5 to July 12.
In the early twentieth century, there were two new light currents with very different conceptions of art: the Art Nouveau and the Viennese Secessionist art had to be search for beauty, free from constraints and ideologies, for expressionist art instead had to express anguish and torment of one’s own ego and lead to reflect on the problems of a time characterized by social and libertarian impulses.
“We want freedom of action and life against the old forces, so deeply rooted”, this program drawn up by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner per Die Brücke, the new artistic movement that he himself, along with some of architecture students, decided to found in Dresden in 1905.
Die Brücke, ‘The Bridge’, wanted to be a sort of ideal crossing from old to new, from neo-romantic art to the torments and the passions of an inner self, and it was a movement that deeply marked the history of art and took the name of expressionism.
German Expressionism was born from the experience of the artists, the metropolis, the circus, street life stimulated from reflections on human loneliness, alienation of the individual.
Over 150 works, including paintings, prints and drawings, from the Brücke Museum in Berlin tell the group, but also the various individual personalities of the founders of the Brücke. “The show alternates salt collective monographic rooms dedicated to individual artists, to help to get across the message that we are talking about a movement, but also of distinct personalities,” says Stefano Zuffi, curator of the exhibition along with Magdalena Moeller, director of the museum in Berlin.
The existential themes of the human being: from worry to brightness, from the fragmentation of the desire of distant worlds expressed through the graphic medium, with a color often “saturated, rich and not natural,” as noted by Zuffi and exhibition focuses precisely on the intensity of the color, which many artists diluted or watered down with gasoline to give more intensity to their works.
Kirchner, the most famous name in the group, is present in addition to the well known Marcella, landscapes and street scenes and bodies caught in their nakedness (as Nude Combing Her Hair) through which it also captures a metamorphosis expressive artist. In Max Pechstein, the only one to study painting, it is evident there was a certain influence of the Fauves and impressionism on him. Besides Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl, in the halls of the Ducal there is also a selection of works by Emil Nolde, another prominent member of the group, but who joined the Brücke only in 1906. An artist, given also its origins, owes much to Edvard Munch, one of the architects of the group for certain common themes.
At the end, a brief collection of works that artists produced after the dissolution of the Brücke, which occurred in 1913, when they already felt the signs of an imminent war and just to reflect on this historic event, the public, in the latest tract exposure, is invited to walk through a dark tunnel. It is meant as a metaphor of the trench and the darkness that enveloped Europe in those years, and on whose tent input images are projected of the First World War.
The exhibition is organized by Genoa Palazzo Ducale Foundation for Culture in collaboration with the Brücke Museum in Berlin and produced by MondoMostre Skira.
Images: palazzoducale.genova.it
Comments by CHELSEA BORRKS