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Expressionism is one of those words, like romanticism, which have a
general and a specific meaning in their function of defining cultural
phenomena. In its wider sense it is taken to describe works of art in
which feeling is given greater prominence than thought; in which the
artist uses his medium not to describe situations, but to express
emotions, and allows it to be manipulated beyond currently accepted
aesthetic conventions for that purpose. Further to enhance the effect on
the spectator, the artist may choose a subject which in itself evokes
strong feelings, usually of repulsion - death, anguish, torture,
suffering. In a stylistic context, expressionism in painting often
implies an emphasis on colour at the expense of line, largely because
the effects of colour are less patient of a rational explanation than
are the effects of line.
Expressionism in this sense is one of the constituent elements in the
dialectic between thought and feeling which powers so much creative
activity, and it is to be found, with varying degrees of intensity, in
all periods and most cultures. The thirteenth-century Byzantine murals
in the church of San Zan Degola in Venice, Giotto's The Mourning over
Christ, in the Capella dell'Arena in Padua, Rembrandt's self-portraits,
the etchings of Goya, and Delacroix's Dante and Virgil in Hell, are all
symptomatic of its spirit.
In a more specific sense, however, Expressionism refers to the works of
a large number of painters (among whom there were many varieties of
style, and some of whom were absorbed into other movements), who during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries translated the general
principles of expressionism into a specific doctrine. In so doing they
effected a transformation of the nature of art which made possible the
traumatic revolution which it has experienced during the last
three-quarters of a century. Expressionism in this sense involved
ecstatic use of colour and emotive distortion of form, reducing
dependence on objective reality, as recorded in terms of Renaissance
perspective, to an absolute minimum, or dispensing with it entirely.
Above all else, it emphasized the absolute validity of the personal
vision, going beyong the Impressionists' accent on personal perception
to project the artist's inner experiences -aggressive, mystical,
anguished or lyrical — on to the spectator. Though this is to define
Expressionism in terms of the visual arts, it was as powerful in music,
literature and the cinema as it was in painting.
The revolt against rationalism, and the accompanying cultivation of the
sensibilities, had been proceeding apace since the beginnings of the
Romantic movement. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth century it
had received support from a variety of sources. The revolutionary
mysticism of Kierkegaard, the existentialism of Heidegger, the tortured
social preoccupations of Ibsen and Strindberg, the febrile anguish of
Swinburne and Whitman, the aggressive Dionysian myths of Nietzsche, all
created a climate of intellectual violence which intoxicated the young.
The discoveries of Darwin reduced the status of man in the scale of
life, and emphasized his relationship to other, more instinctual
creatures. The theories of Marx suggested that he was the toy of history
rather than its master. The researches of Freud, which made their impact
felt most clearly in those countries where Expressionism flourished,
suggested that our actions are not motivated by those processes of
conscious thought on which we had placed such reliance. Bergson stressed
the subjective nature of perception, and the flow and flux between
nature and the mind of man. In developing humanism, Western man had
begun to alter his notions of humanity.
The romantic stereotype of the artist as an anguished creator, tormented
into creativity by his finely attuned sensitivities, had become accepted
by the 1870s, and it is not without significance that among those
artists involved in Expressionism, at least six, Van Gogh, Munch, Ensor,
Kirchner, Beckmann and Grosz, experienced psychotic as well as neurotic
episodes. Nor was the situation helped by the temper of the times. Most
of the Expressionists were young men when the Great War broke out, and
old men when the horrors of Hitler's extermination camps were unveiled.
Events provided them with as much anguish as they needed, and their
involvement with the more macabre aspects of history is reflected in
such coincidences as that the leading Expressionist magazine in Berlin
was entitled Der Sturm, foreshadowing the Stormtroopers of a later
decade.
There were recent precedents for the Expressionists' hunger for
sensation. In the 1880s and 1890s the so-called Decadents and the
Symbolists had explored sex, drugs, religion, mysticism, magic and
alcohol as paths to creativity, and in so doing had helped to cast the
artist in the role of archetypal rebel against society and the
establishment. The Expressionists were to go further in this respect
than the socialists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, such as W'illiam
Morris and Walter Crane; and the same individualism which led them to
reject the conventions of official art led them to a profound concern
with human suffering and deprivation which found expression in Anarchism
or Communism. Indeed, the relationship between Expressionism and
Communism still survives on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
In one of the most popular books of the fin de siecle, La- bas, J. K.
Huysmans describes Griinewald's Karlsruhe Crucifixion thus: 'Dislocated,
almost dragged from their sockets, the arms of Christ seemed pinioned
from shoulder to wrist by the cords of the twisted muscles. . . . The
flesh was swollen, stained and blackened, spotted with flea-bites.
Decomposition had set in. A thicker stream poured from the open wound on
the side, flooding the hip with blood that matched deep mulberry juice.
. . . The feet, spongy and clotted, were horrible; the swollen flesh
rising above the head of the nail, the clenched toes, contradicting the
imploring gestures of the hands, seemed cursing as they clawed at the
ochreous earth.'
This expressionist prose, replete with horror, highly personal, full of
chromatic adjectives, describes the work of a rediscovered artist who
himself was one of the most significant forerunners of Expressionism.
The movement was in fact greatly nurtured by the work of art historians
such as Friedlander, whose exhaustive study of Grunewald appeared in
1907, of Mayer whose monograph on El Greco was published in 1911, and of
others who at this period wrote about Hogarth, Bosch, Goya and Bruegel,
all of whom represented elements in the expressionist tradition. At the
same time, too, new precedents were provided by the discovery of
irrational, 'primitive' art, of popular art, which owed nothing to
cultured sensibilities, and of the traditions of caricature, which had
always distorted objective reality to convey a message or sensation.
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Fauvism
Expressionism, in the sense in which I have described it, has always
been regarded as a Teutonic and Nordic phenomenon; but its appearance in
modern painting is the result of a liberation of colour and form which
took place in France, and which culminated in the short-lived but
seminal style known as Fauvism.
When in 1906 the group which had gathered round Henri Matisse exhibited
together as the Salon des Independants, it is little wonder that in
terms of current conventional sensibilities, the art critic Louis
Vauxcelles (who had a gift for assessing art historians of the future;
he also coined the word 'Cubists') should have described them asfauves —
wild beasts. As a coherent group it was remarkably short-lived, and
virtually ended a year after its birth; most of its members went on to
other styles, and of those who retained the original Fauve inspiration
many became embedded in its mannerisms. But it represented the birth of
the School of Paris, and shared (with Expressionism proper) the
responsibility for creating the art of the twentieth century.
France was special. Since at least the time of Louis XIV, the arts there
had been fostered by the State on a formidable scale, discussed by the
intelligentsia with passion, explored by their practitioners with a
vigour never consistently attained in any other European country. French
painting, marked in the eighteenth century by elegance and visual
sophistication, was characterized in the nineteenth by an evolutionary
dynamism. Stimulated by the special social and cultural atmosphere of
Paris, with its museums and galleries, its art schools, still working on
the traditional atelier system, its closely-knit community of artists in
constant social contact through the network of cafes, French painting
evolved with a remarkable speed and diversity, establishing a dialogue
which lasted for more than a century between the romantic and the
classical, the hard and the soft, the emotional and the intellectual.
The pattern which had been established in the contrast between Ingres
and Delacroix persisted under many different guises.
The Impressionists in the 1870s had made the most spectacular
contribution to what might be called the perceptual revolution, creating
a new form of visual humanism by vindicating the primacy of the
individual sensibility. As a result, Impressionism was never consistent
or homogeneous. Tensions between thought and feeling, between line and
colour, between analysis and synthesis, were there all the time,
expressed not only in the difference between, say, Sisley and Pissarro,
but between phases in the work of single artists, such as Manet and
Renoir.
The hunger for ordered structure was the most apparent of the disruptive
elements, producing the Pointillism or Divisionism of Seurat and Signac,
with its hieratic rigidity of structure and its dogmatic use of dots of
pure complementary colours, and those architectural explorations of form
which led eventually from Cezanne to Cubism. But its complementary
antithesis was also very much present. The current was flowing strongly
in the direction of emotional sensibility, in France as elsewhere. A
generation which looked up to Baudelaire could not but be aware of the
fact, and towards the last quarter of the century the desire to wring
the last drop of sensation took the same shapes in Paris as it did all
over Europe. Beneath the surface of conventional life there existed an
'underground' as active in its explorations as any which exists today.
Drugs were endowed with a cultural cachet by readers of Poe, Coleridge
and Baudelaire; alcoholism was as widespread in Montmartre and
Montparnasse as it was in the deprived rural areas of France. There was
a hunger for unmentionable vices and strange experiences; there was even
a not unfamiliar passion for anarchism. An important Fauvist painter,
Maurice de Vlaminck, once wrote: 'Painting was an abscess which drained
off all the evil in me. Without a gift for painting I would have gone to
the bad. What I could have achieved in a social context only by throwing
a bomb, which would have led me to the guillotine, I have tried to
express in art, in painting, by using pure colours straight from the
tube. Thus I have been able to use my destructive instincts in order to
recreate a sensitive, living and free world.'
This romantic agony, as it took shape in the context of French culture,
touched a wide range of artists. The music of Debussy and of Faure
throbbed with new excitements, and the theme of Salome as expressed in
Oscar Wilde's verse drama attracted not only
Aubrey Beardsley
but
Gustaves
Moreau, too often described as a traditional salon painter.
'Nature itself is of little importance; it is merely a pretext for
artistic expression. Art is the relentless pursuit of the expression of
inward feeling by means of simple plasticity.' These sentiments were the
basis of Moreau's teaching, and his pupil
Henri
Matisse was to find them
'profoundly troubling'; they were to be the unavowed credo of Fauvism.
There were more apparent precedents.
Vincent Van Gogh had never made any
pretence that his art was other than the expression of inward feeling. T
don't know if I can paint the postman as I feel him,'' he once wrote to
his brother Theo; and the fervour of his colour, the emotive violence of
his forms, were having an impact which was emphasized by the first
retrospective held at Bernheim-Jeune's gallery in 1901, at which Matisse
was introduced to Vlaminck by another painter,
Andre Derain.
In 1889
Paul Gauguin, staying at Pont-Aven in Brittany, had been moving
towards a style which would combine spontaneity, mysticism and a
complete disregard for 'truth to nature' with the use of non-descriptive
colours, as exemplified in The Yellow Christ. The motivation may well
have been literary and Symbolist; 'I find everything poetic, and it is
in the dark corners of my heart, which are sometimes mysterious, that I
perceive poetry,' he wrote to Van Gogh at this time. The stylistic
origins lay in Japanese and primitive art, but the total effect was one
of emotional excitation of the 'dark corners of the heart', implying as
time went by (Contes Barbares of 1902) a total independence of the
artist from any terms of reference except those of his own
sensibilities.
The technical revolution which was under way was Expressionist in
perhaps the purest sense of the word: it had no exclusive connection
with any particular kind of subject matter, but was concerned with the
direct use of colour and form, not to suggest but to express. It was a
necessary step in the emancipation of art from literal depiction. The
essence of what came to be known as Fauvism, which every painter
interpreted in his own way, lay in the uninhibited use of colour to
define form and express feeling. In
Matisse's
Nude in the Studio of
1898, the purity, the violence of the colour conveys a sense of audacity
that disguises the resolute quest for formal coherence, inherited from
Cezanne, which he was never to abandon.
There was clearly something in
the air at the moment which transcended personal contacts and coteries,
for in Barcelona, for instance, nineteen-year-old
Pablo Picasso was
painting pictures such as The Window which showed the same tendency for
forms to dissolve in, and be moulded by, evocative colour; in Picasso's
case they were less pure, less adventurous, echoing the palette of Manet
rather than venturing into new chromatic dimensions.
Personal contacts, however, were the flashpoint which ignited Fauvism.
The common experiences of Moreau's studio were extended in 1899 at the
Academie Carriere, where Matisse met two painters from the Paris suburb
of Chatou, Andre Derain and the self-taught
Maurice
Vlaminck, both of
whom were making adventurous visual experiments in the same direction
under the influence of Van Gogh. Vlaminck, an explosive, naturally
gifted, physically vital man, an anarchist and a champion cyclist, who
once said that he loved Van Gogh more than his own father, obviously
owed something to his Flemish ancestry. Consumed with a passion for
brutal truth, he crucified his sitters with something approaching
relish, handling paint with a Chardin-like verve.
Matisse was to build his subsequent career on his experiences and
discoveries during this period, in which he produced some of his most
spectacular works. The continuing evolution of colour and its
emancipation from accepted perceptual conventions led to an increasing
concern with what he called 'pictorial mechanism', which owed a lot to
the disciplines of Seurat's Pointillism: its structural purity and use
of dots of pure colour. Abandoning realism, he kept a tangential hold on
reality; and even in a painting such as Luxury I he not only retained
spatial depth, but arranged the figures in a composition which would not
have been unfamiliar to an artist of the Renaissance. They are
simplified, stylized, but not distorted for any emotive reason. At the
same time, however, they convey perfectly the resonances of the title.
Among Matisse's associates in the early 1900s, the closest to him was
Albert
Marquet. From a style close to the bold formalism of
Edouard Vuillard and the other members of the
Nabi group of the 1890s, Marquet
migrated to one which, though expressive in form and technique, eschewed
the pure brilliant colours of Vlaminck or Matisse, and kept much closer
to figurative sources. In Matisse Painting a Nude, for instance, the
colour appears rather as a background than as an integral part of the
whole composition; the figure is defined by a line, and not modelled by
the surrounding areas of colour. There is also apparent Marquet's
growing concern with a subdued palette, and with the potentialities of a
luminous black; in many ways he reverted to a Manet-like approach to
painting, and his draughtmanship was such that Matisse once described
him, with some pertinence, as 'the French Hokusai'.
Andre Derain brought to the Fauves something of the same vigour and
panache as his friend Vlaminck; he too used colour directly from the
tube, applied in broken lines with quick impetuous brush-strokes; but
even in his youthful works he was more lucid, more thoughtful, more
graceful. Conscious of the past, his discovery of the emotive use of
colour owed as much to the Pointillists as it did to Van Gogh, and his
forms were influenced by a variety of precedents: Images d'Epinal, those
simple folk-images which had so appealed to Courbet and Gauguin;
Byzantine art; and the simplified planes of African sculpture. In 1905,
the year in which he visited London and painted scenes on the Thames, he
produced views of the Seine in which Seurat's Pointillist technique is
allied to Van Gogh's hatched brush-strokes to produce works of organized
lucidity, remarkable for their emotional coherence.
Face to face with a living model, however,
Derain's work took on greater
immediacy; and in Lady in a Chemise he came close to the impetuous
vehemence which was at the heart of Fauvism. The multiplicity of colours
and tones, the flickering flame-like brushwork, the exaggeration of the
face and eyes, the heavily pendulous and slightly distorted left hand,
the partial use of a contour line to define those parts of the figure
which play a dominant part in the composition, create an impression of
adventurousness which in the long run turned out to be alien to his
talent.
'How, with what I have here, can I succeed in rendering, not what I see,
but what is, what has an existence for me, my reality, then set to work
drawing, taking from nature what suits my needs? I drew the contours of
each object in black mixed with white, each time leaving in the middle
of the paper a blank space which I then coloured in with a specific and
quite intense tone. What did I have? Blue, green, ochre, not many
colours. But the result surprised me. I had discovered what I was really
looking for.' The description which
Raoul Dufy gave, many years later,
of his conversion to the ideas of Fauvism, describes as well as anything
the sense of elated emancipation which so many of his contemporaries
felt, and it is immediately apparent in his paintings of this period;
they have a chunky vitality which his later, more graceful and
sophisticated works were to lose completely. Placards at Trouville, with
its movement, its bold simplified outlines, its areas of bright colour,
each emitting an air of joyous sensationalism, conveys perfectly the
sense of seaside holiday-making in fresh sparkling air. Born at Le
Havre, Othon Friesz studied at school under the same teachers as Dufy,
and he too was fascinated by seaside subjects. His Sunday at Honfleur,
painted a year after Dufy's exercise at Trouville, emphasizes the
differences between them. The composition is more static, the colour
less adventurous, the lines heavier, more dominant; the desire to charge
the canvas with some kind of lyrical emotion is more apparent, and
therefore less successful. Friesz's thirst for visual eloquence was to
lead him eventually to a baroque exuberance which verged on the
hysterical.
The
Fauve experience was for many artists a period of liberation,
marking the moment at which they escaped from the conventions of realism
and the confines of the conventional palette to achieve a realization,
on which their future careers would be built, that the artist was
concerned with the primacy of his own personal vision, and with creating
a world which he himself controlled. This is especially evident in the
case of Georges Braque, who was, like Friesz, a native of Le Havre. It
was Friesz who first introduced him to what the Fauves were doing; and
for some three years, between 1904 and 1907, he produced a series of
works which, though vivid in colour and exuberant in line, are
thoughtful in composition, velvety in texture, and more deliberate in
execution than the general run of paintings his friends were producing.
Already there was implicit in them a concern with construction, a
tendency to flatness of composition, which foreshadowed the emergence of
Cubism. But artists such as Robert Delaunay, who themselves were never
Fauves, and who went on to Cubism, Futurism or any of the other
subsequent movements which the Fauve revolt had made possible, always
retained strong evidence of its influence in their works, paying
unconscious tribute to its liberating force, and to the new significance
which it had given to colour.
This was even more true of those artists whom one might define as
unconscious
Fauves, of whom the most outstanding example was
Georges
Rouault. A pupil of Moreau, and at one time marginally connected with
Matisse's group, Rouault never really felt in sympathy with the
movement, although he was equally concerned with wringing anguish from
his colours, and using art as a means of expressing a personal,
anti-realist viewpoint. The two dominant elements in his creative
make-up were his early experiences as an apprentice to a maker of
stained glass, and his friendship with two prominent figures in the
Catholic revival which had such an important influence in the cultural
life of the early twentieth century: J. K. Huysmans, a convert who
united the fervours of belief with the recently shed languors of
decadence, and Leon Bloy, one of the new school of writers who combined
a radical concern about social justice with an almost excessive passion
for the traditional values which he saw enshrined in Christianity. From
these combined sources Rouault built up a style which varied little
throughout the whole of his career. From his religious and social
preoccupations he evolved an iconography which dealt with religious
subjects, with whores and clowns, with all that involved the grandeurs
and miseries of la condition humaine, and a passion tinged with bitter
irony, even pessimism. From his feeling for the translucent beauty of
stained glass he evolved a style characterized by its craftsmanship, its
Byzantine simplicity, its luminous colours. But, in spite of these
personal mannerisms, Rouault was still at heart a Fauve. The sense of
stylistic passion, the savage slashes of colour, the need for vehemence,
become more apparent when, as in Versailles: The Fountain, the subject
matter is not overtly Expressionistic.
The extent of Rouault's Fauvism can be assessed by comparing his
work with that of the happy, extroverted
Kees van Dongen,
an instinctive, archetypal Bohemian, who also had a penchant for
painting clowns and the demi-monde, and whose finest work has an
exuberant panache, an evocative passion, which seduce rather
than convince. His momentary strengths and his eventual
weaknesses sprang from the fact that he was a natural painter. A
member of the Fauves, he later went on to join the German group
Die Briicke, and in this context demonstrated the gulf which
existed between those artists to whom passion in painting was a
matter of style and those for whom it was a way of life.
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A Northern Episode
The almost irresistible urge to identify the genius of Expressionism
with that of Nordic cultures - and to relate its degrees of intensity to
the distance which separated its practitioners from the shores of the
Mediterranean and the influences of Catholicism — receives its most
cogent support from the work and personality of , whose
paintings have become the very archetypes of all that the movement
implied. A Norwegian, he was nourished in the same traditions which
produced the guilt-tinged work of Ibsen and Strindberg (who wrote a
catalogue entry to his The Kiss). Profoundly neurotic, his childhood was
spent in the most inauspicious circumstances: his mother died when he
was five, and one of his sisters when he was thirteen; his father was a
doctor who practised in a poverty-ridden area of Loiten. He grew up in
an atmosphere dominated by the ideas of death, disease and anxiety, and
the images of this period of his life were always to remain with him. In
the Madonna of 1895-1902, for instance, the typically 'decadent' concept
of the subject as a nearly nude, whore-like figure is reinforced by a
painted border of spermatozoa, which lead to an embryo in the lower
left-hand corner, derived from an illustration in a German anatomical
text-book published in the middle of the century, and presumably forming
part of his father's library.
Significantly enough, Aubrey Beardsley made use of the identical figure
in several of his drawings; which underlines the fact that many artists
who came to creative maturity in the later nineteenth century were
obsessed with the same symbols, the same preoccupations. The concept of
the femme fatale, using the phrase in its literal sense, to indicate the
idea of woman as a malevolent, destructive and seductive siren, played a
vital part in the work of Munch. Time and time again he reverts to the
theme of woman as vampire, as the fatal temptress, and even in his
Madonnas he seems intent on destroying utterly the icon which in the
past had done so much to idealize femininity.
No less was he seduced by the idea of death and disease. In part this
may have been due to the circumstances of his childhood; death
struggles, sick rooms and the paraphernalia of mortality intrigued him
as much as the themes of classical mythology had obsessed Poussin. But
there was more to it than that. The idea of eventual personal
annihilation has always been emotive, and the ninteenth century was more
than half in love with easeful death. Queen Victoria was as susceptible
to the idea as Munch, and in some curious way — partly at least
explained by Mario Praz — it had become intermingled with sexuality.
Keats, Schubert, Schiller and many others had underlined the connection
in the early part of the century; the Belgian Antoine Wiertz (1806—65)
devoted his whole artistic career to the theme, and bequeathed to an
ungrateful posterity a museum commemorating the fact. But nowhere -
because he bent his technique to underlining his image — has the idea
been better elaborated than in
Munch's Death and the Maiden of 1893. On
the left of the picture wriggle the spermatozoic shapes; on the right is
a frieze composed of two foetus-like creatures. Death himself is no
traditional Gothic-horror skeleton, though the black branch-like lines
which echo his shape suggest the anatomical: he is a semi-human shape,
full of amorphous ambiguities, the sense of horror emphasized by the
wooden leg-stump which emerges through the girl's thigh. She, on the
other hand, is characterized by an exuberant sensuality, underlined in a
formal sense by the heaviness of her thighs, the solidity of her
buttocks, the bluntness of her face, and the exaggeration of the line
which runs from her left armpit to her knee.
That
Munch had personality problems more pressing than those which beset
the generality of mankind is obvious, and it would be ridiculous to
disregard them in assessing the nature of his work. His neuroses are
apparent in such a way that the work is often the graphic expression of
actual experience. He was conscious of this, and in his diary he records
the experience which created one of his most symptomatic subjects,
The
Scream. 'I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was
setting, and I began to be afflicted with a sense of melancholy.
Suddenly the sky became blood-red. I stopped and leaned against a fence,
feeling dead-tired, and stared at the flaming clouds that hung, like
blood and a sword, over the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends
walked on. I stood riveted, trembling with fright. And I heard (felt) a
loud, unending scream piercing nature.'
The experience, then, although psychological in origin, was as real to
him as to a mystic. But many have had similar sensations; what was in a
sense unique about Munch was that within the traditional framework of
the European artistic tradition, he forged a remarkably expressive - the
adjective is inescapable - visual technique, combining the curved
whiplash line of Art Nouveau with colours which range from the acidulous
to the sentimental in a frenzy of compositional vigour which is often
strongly reminiscent of Van Gogh. Nor is the stylistic affinity
accidental. In 1889 Munch had travelled to Paris on a state scholarship
and had come into contact with Van Gogh and Gauguin - the latter, as
usual with younger artists, exerting a strong influence on him. In 1892
he was invited to exhibit at the Verein der Berliner Kiinstler, where,
after a great deal of controversy which helped to impress Munch on the
German artistic awareness, and led to the foundation of the Berlin
Secession, the leaders of the society closed the exhibition in which he
was participating. But it was in the German capital that he came into
fruitful contact with the poet Richard Dehmel, the critic and historian
Julius Meier-Graefe, the enlightened industrialist Walter Rathenau (who
first bought a Munch painting in 1893) and Strindberg. By 1895 he was
back in Paris again, and for the next few years lived a cosmopolitan
existence, though forced to spend occasional periods in a sanatorium. In
1908 he suffered a complete collapse and spent a year in Dr Daniel
Jacobson's hospital in Copenhagen. In 1909 he returned to Norway and
passed the rest of his life there in relative seclusion.
Like his literary compatriots,
Munch was preoccupied with feelings
rather than objects, and above all else with their effects on people and
their relationships. In this latter respect he was unusual among the
Expressionists. This is apparent especially in the contrast between his
work and that of his Belgian contemporary
James Ensor, with whom, in
other respects, he has many affinities. Both were ecstatic in their
approach; both concerned themselves with the dark underside of life; and
yet both drew support and nourishment from the traditional elements of
art — though this was more apparent with Ensor, whose affinities with
Turner, and even with Chardin, need no underlining. Even physically they
were rather alike. But the style is almost invariably the man, and Ensor
seems through his Flemish mother to have established instinctive contact
with the cultural tradition which she represented. It was derived not
from the Italianate episodes of the seventeenth century as represented
by Rubens, nor from the French-orientated style of the Walloons, but
from a stream of uninhibited visual fantasy, interlaced with bucolic
folklore, which, stretching back to the Middle Ages, had found its
supreme expression in the works of Pieter Bruegel, and which, continuing
into the twentieth century, has helped (largely through Belgian artists
such as Magritte and Delvaux) to link Expressionism with Surrealism.
Ensor marks, more clearly than any other artist the line of continuity
between the so-called 'Nibelungen Expressionists' - Hieronymous Bosch,
Urs Graf, Hans Baldung Grien — and the artists of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century.
Satirical, compassionate, acerbic and whimsical, Ensor created a
universe of his own, peopled with absurd, tawdry, moving, shocking
figures which grip the imagination, stimulate the fancy and by their
very vehemence produce just that shock to the susceptibilities of the
spectator which is the prime goal of Expressionism. Skeletons Warming
Themselves at a Stove might well be an epitome of the whole movement:
the macabre theme, the sinister whimsicality of the scattered skulls
grouped grotesquely in a clumsy pyramid around the stove, the minatory
figure in the right-hand corner of the composition. But despite the
subject matter — and this is a consistent element in Ensor's work - the
colouring has a light, sensuous quality, which verges on the lyrical,
and underlines his debt to the Impressionists. It was only in his early
phase that his technique verged on the sombre, and even then it had a
delicate, velvety texture.
Skeletons Warming Themselves at a Stove looks almost as though it might
be an illustration of some pungent, folksy proverb, and though Ensor was
capable of painting such pictures as The Ray which have no meaning other
than that conveyed by the form and colour, there are always literary and
social implications in his major works. They are commentaries, even
though the precise nature of the moral is never clearly indicated. This
is especially true of the Entry of Christ into Brussels, which packs
into one massive composition (250 x 434 cm) a whole host of satirical,
grotesque episodes and situations. A great mass of ugly, distorted
faces; Christ mounted on an ass; a broad banner with the inscription
Vive la Sociale: the whole thing is like some mad kermesse portrayed in
a manner which hints at a parody of a historical grande machine by a
Baroque artist. Again, the colours are light, lyrical, but emphatically
dissonant; and the substructure of drawing is marked by a deliberate
coarseness - vulgarity would not be too strong a word - which underlines
one of Ensor's greatest contributions to the vocabulary of
Expressionism, the use of line to create an emotive effect independently
of colour. It was this quality which especially endeared him to Paul
Klee, and to Emil Nolde, both of whom derived a great deal from his
influence. It is important to remember that Ensor produced his most
significant work in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century —
The Entry of Christ into Brussels was painted in 1889 — and that, more
forcibly than Gauguin, and even than Van Gogh, he assailed the primacy
of the representational element in art, deriving his inspiration largely
from that one area in which it had never played an important part -
caricature. At the same time too his exploration of the incongruous and
the irrational anticipated developments which would not become apparent
in the mainstream of art until the second decade of the twentieth
century. Life, death, the absurd grandeur of the human condition, were
themes which obsessed him, whatever the changes which took place in a
style which showed at times the influence of Turner, of Constable and of
Rowlandson (in the Royal Museum at Antwerp there are copies by him of
works by all three of these). An assiduous student of the great
printmakers and etchers (Rembrandt, Callot, Daumier and Forain were his
favourites), he produced, especially in the 1880s, a great number ol
etchings and other monochrome works in which Goyaesque fantasy illumines
disciplined skill.
He was subject to the ambiguities of his time, and though public
recognition came late, he could well be claimed as a precursor by
Fauves, Expressionists and Surrealists alike; while, equally, the
Symbolists might have observed in his work strong elements of their own
preoccupation with metaphysical references. He was, after all, the
compatriot and largely the contemporary of Emile Verhaeren and Maurice
Maeterlinck. His iconography with its strong allusive qualities would
have been acceptable to artists who eschewed the violence of his
technique, and his preoccupation with those imaginative resonances which
were the concern of painters as disparate as Redon and Klimt is
suggested by his concern with masks — as in the famous Self-portrait
with Masks. The autobiographical source of these (as well as of his
concern with shells and Chinese porcelain) was doubtless the stall which
his mother used to run on the front at Ostend. But they came to possess
for him an abiding significance, reflecting at once the psychic
anomalies of his own life and the baffling enigmas of interpersonal
relationships. Masked figures were almost a cliche of Symbolist art, but
Ensor was the first to raise them to the status of independent entities,
suggestive question-marks in the carnival of life.
Although he was a co-founder of the avant-garde group Les XX, which
exhibited Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon at the Island of La Grande Jatte
in 1887, Ensor did not start to receive real recognition until the
1920s, by which time he had long done his best work. But he did play a
significant part in forming the considerable tradition of Belgian
Expressionism, itself a vital link in the transmission of all that the
movement implied to later generations.
The links between Paris and Brussels had always been close, and a
typical transitional figure was Rik Wouters, who, commencing as a
self-taught artist, visited Paris, where he came under the influence of
Degas and Cezanne, to whom, superficially, his style owes a great deal.
But in his case what might have been little more than a kind of
derivative Post-Impressionism was transformed, partly through the
influence of Ensor, partly through the consuming passion which he felt
for his wife Nel, into something much more dynamic, broad in handling,
lyrically emotive in colouring, with passages of rich vibrancy which
suggest the basic grammar of pure Expressionism.
For him there was never any precise moment of conversion; perhaps his
life was too short for that, and a more typical figure was Gust de Smet,
whose career illuminates the way in which the dormant inclination to
Expressionism which was inherent in Flemish art could be triggered off
by external stimuli into something closer to our conception of an
international style. When in Holland he broke away from the luminist
tradition which he had derived from the Impressionists, and, largely
through the magazine Das Kunstblalt, became familiar with what was
happening in Germany. His art became wilder, more tragic, the brushwork
quick, nervous, ecstatic, with sombre earthen colours, and he chose for
his subjects those emotion-laden themes - prostitutes, circus people,
peasants - which had come to be accepted as the accredited icons of
twentieth-century romanticism. After flirting for a while with the
structural dynamics of Cubism, he reverted in the 1930s to paintings in
which the sonorous play of light and colour within a clearly defined
outline evokes a sense of passionate sensuality.
Rik Wouters
Nel Wouters
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Gust de Smet
The Striped
Skirt
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If Bruegel was Flemish, so too was Rubens, and the particular brand of
Expressionism which dominated Flanders for the first quarter of this
century was on the whole humane rather than violent, lyrical rather than
vehement; an Expressionism of the brush rather than of the heart. This
was as true of De Smet as it was of his friend and contemporary Constant
Permeke, who also started off his artistic career in the
Impressionist-inclined artists' colony of Sint-Matens-Latem, and then
developed an emotive monumentality which retained Ensor's sense of
near-abstraction and visual violence. Objects ceased to be clearly
visible, and were discernible rather than apparent; there was a
largeness of treatment, an air of the cosmic about both his figures and
his landscapes. Wounded in the war, Permeke lived for five years in
considerable poverty among the farmers of Devonshire, an experience
which confirmed in him that penchant for a kind of rural mysticism which
was one of the minor strands in the Expressionist tradition, deriving
its sanction from both Van Gogh and the Pont Aven school. The sense of
lyrical rapture infuses his paintings with a Turneresque quality which
may have been consciously acquired in England, but more directly it
permits the unification of a whole variety of disparate objects - trees,
houses, windmills - which assume a limpid plasticity within an
all-embracing light.
Leon Spilliaert, although self-taught, was formally more sophisticated,
his art more elusive. Untouched by
Ensor, but owing much to Munch, his
earliest works have strong Symbolist characteristics, the linear
arabesques which dominate them suggesting an impassioned Art Nouveau
with emotional undercurrents alien to that more purely decorative style.
But from the very beginning, his paintings had an unreal, hallucinatory
quality, and certain images obsessed him — girls by the seaside, human
beings confronting and being absorbed by nature. Trees came to play an
increasingly dominant role in his imagery, and he observed them with a
frenzied intensity which converts them from inanimate phenomena into
brooding totems, transforming their surroundings into landscapes of the
mind heavy with hidden significances. More clearly than any of his
contemporaries, he shows the intricacy of the network which linked
Symbolism,
Expressionism and
Surrealism.
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