The expressionist roots of modernism / Peter Lasko.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lasko, Peter.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Expressionism (Art)--Germany.

Expressionism (Art).

Modernism (Aesthetics).

Germany.

Expressionism (Art)--Germany--Influence.

Modernism (Aesthetics)--Germany.

Art, German--20th century.

Art, German.

Physical Description:

x, 196 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2003.

Summary:

Although it cannot be disputed that the great art that finally broke the spell of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism was produced in Paris, the experiments of Cubism, Purism, Orphism and Fauvism were short-lived and exerted little influence on the developments of art after the First World War, and even less after the Second World War. This book contends that it was in Germany between 1906 and 1914 that artists took the fundamental steps, intellectually as well as artistically, that were to determine the course art was to take for the rest of the century. It was the Russian emigre in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky, who first argued the case for total abstraction in art and for a total right of self-expression. It led directly to non-objective painting and, together with Marcel Duchamp's important contribution in France, to the nihilism of Dada and eventually to the post-1945 New York School. The author shows that since then, artists have gone well beyond abstraction in their exploitation of that search for originality granted to them by the theoretical position taken up in Germany after 1910. This important and fascinating book will be of great value to researchers and teachers looking at twentieth-century art.

Contents:

1 German art around 1900: the Secessions and German Impressionism 8

2 The groups founded in towns and the countryside 26

3 The beginnings of Expressionism: the student days of the Brucke in Dresden 35

4 The break with direct visional experience 62

5 The Blaue Reiter 83

6 The theories of abstraction 98

7 Individualists 131

8 The contribution of Expressionism 145

9 The legacy of Expressionism 165.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [179]-185) and index.

ISBN:

0719064104

OCLC:

52494821