came together, and it is here that the uniquely Viennese Art Nouveau developed. It showed the influences of French Symbolism and the Munich Secession. It became ever more luxuriant, subtle, and psychologically exaggerated. Above all else, it was very reflected the eroticism present the insights of Sigmund Freud, who was, at the time, publishing the results of his psychoanalytical research.
Gustav Klimt is the main representative of this imposing, sumptuous Art Nouveau. Even when he began to incorporate Expressionist decorative elements into his visual language, there was no denying his origins. Though he depicted the human subjects of his paintings with a greater emphasis on their traits, he still surrounded them in a splendidly ornamented background of mosaic-like spatial decoration. Klimt was the darling of Viennese society. The figures are encapsulated in a veil made of ornaments that seem to be taken from Egyptian or Byzantine mosaics and are just as extensive and splendidly colourful in gold, silver or black. In contrast to this, he depicted the head and the face in a dainty manner exuding tenderness and emotional ecstasy.
Egon Schiele, who was nearly twenty years younger, did not have much time to make is mark on the world. By 1918, he was dead at the age of 28. Nevertheless, he left an astonishingly impressive body of work. Daringly, he very quickly achieved a unique and unmistakeable visual language that was harsh and ascetic, bizarre, and rough. He deliberately presented deformations of the body and psyche, as well as the emotional suffering and depression among primarily the lower social classes. His works have a touch of death and melancholy. The erotic ecstasy in his works provoked public outrage. He was imprisoned for four weeks in 1912, ‘for the production of pornographic images.’ In the same year, he was invited to the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne.
In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka, inspired by Sigmund Freud, began a series of psychological portraits. With x-ray-like vision, he analysed the eternal conflict between the genders. Kokoschka created existential portraits of people without pretension or masks. He was a portrait painter with a high degree of emotional sensitivity and the ability to reveal through the visual image. Kokoschka’s hallucinatory and visionary gift allowed him to plumb the state of the psyche and to enter the soul of his subjects. He himself once aptly described himself as a ‘psychological can opener.’ One example of this is the portrait of the psychiatrist Auguste Forel done in 1910. In the same year, Kokoschka moved to Berlin and for a short time found a new home with Herwarth Walden, who repeatedly displayed his work. The Viennese critics in 1911 described his portraits as follows:
He paints faces of people who wilt in the bad office air… Possibly, this is a left-wing depiction… nothing more than the hopeless expression of a painful soul in the state of decay… He brews his colours together out of poisonous putrefaction… they shimmer bile yellow, fever green, frost blue… ointment-like he smears them and leaves them scratchy and encrusted, scarred and crusty… Depravity is the lure of these paintings. They have, of course, meaning as a manifesto of an era of decay, but seen artistically, they are a massacre of colour.
The vibrant city of Berlin, where he stayed several times until the outbreak of the war, dynamised Oskar Kokoschka’s painting style more and more. A striking example is from The Hurricane of 1914, which shows the artist himself with his lover, Alma Maria Mahler. A nearly ornamental brushwork captures the situation in a flowing movement.
Kokoschka was, like many artists of the classic modernist school, not only a painter but also a writer. He spent the years between 1917 to 1923 in Dresden, where he had followed the actress Käthe Richter from Berlin. During this time, when he taught at the Dresden academy, he did many portraits of scholars, literati and actors. His style had now become markedly calmer. He chose colours that were strong and luminous. He applied them in broad strokes, often with a palette knife. Colour became almost autonomous. They were applied in thick coats upon the canvas. Colour became a material. During the Dresden period, he completed the portrait called The Persian. It shows the publisher and art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt. He applied coloured dot next to coloured dot with a palette knife. Luminous red is the main accent, whose effect is velvety soft, and the paste-like colour formation has a carpet-like effect. The depiction conveys authority, peace and ease. After 1924, Kokoschka travelled around Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This resulted in a series of landscapes and cityscapes like those of Prague, Lyon, London, and Constantinople. Far beyond an Impressionistic depiction, he captured the play of light, the moment, the essential nature of things and the creation of a certain dynamism. His work in its entirety remains connected to the visible and the representational.
Egon Schiele, The Embrace (Couple II, Man and Woman), 1917.
Oil on canvas, 98 × 169 cm. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907–1908.
Oil, gilt and silver plating on canvas, 180 × 180 cm.
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
Oskar Kokoschka, The Wind’s Fiancée, 1914.
Oil on canvas, 181 × 221 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basel.
Curious, the young generation seeks to see and experience everything that is new. In many cities, people gathered in Secessionist societies. Thus, the exchange of information among artists increased, as well as their acceptance in society. In the open-minded Rhineland, there was contact with the most important centres of art. The connections to France and Paris were closer there than elsewhere. That lent the art of this region an especially French feeling. Expressionism was more moderate here. The jagged splintering of shapes or the ecstasy of colour appeared only seldom among the Rhinelanders and only in moderated form. The Rhenish painters were more likely to be oriented towards Fauvism and Cubism, but, above all else, towards the Orphism of Robert Delaunay. The young August Macke from Bonn was a driving force and a towering personality. He was in close contact with the Blaue Reiter and took part in organising the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon in 1913 in Berlin. Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism and the Blaue Reiter all gave the artists living in the Rhineland impressions that, taken all together, developed into Rhenish Expressionism with its special lyrical tinge.
The crucial cultural event occurred in the summer of 1912 in Cologne, where the International Exhibition of the Sonderbund West German Friends of Art and Artists at Cologne had a total of 634 paintings, sculptures and hand drawings on display. For the first time ever at this world exhibition, all the leading and driving forces of modernist art from Impressionism to Picasso were brought together. The most important artists from our view today, the trailblazers of modernist art such as Van Gogh, Munch, Cézanne and Gauguin were given dedicated exhibition halls. The effect was international, definitive, sweeping, and an impetus for the famous Amory Show, which was held in the early part of 1913 in New York. At this event, more than 1500 exhibits were shown, a third of them being European.
The effect of the famous Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 in Cologne (which for many of the artists was a revelation) was also felt immediately among the young Rhinelanders. A touring exhibit of Italian Futurists during October of 1912 in Cologne reinforced this. This exhibit had previously been seen with Herwarth Walden in Berlin and was now being taken by August Macke to the Rhineland. From the knowledge gained from the exhibited avant-garde, the art of the young Rhineland painters developed further. After the World War I, they came together in the Junges Rheinland (Young Rhineland).
For the first time in July 1913, the artistic avant-garde of the West put on a combined exhibit in the art salon of the Cohen Bookstore. Wilhelm Worringer, who taught at the University of Cologne, had an academically open-minded view of Expressionism and Modernist art. August Macke, along with sixteen other young artists, took part in one of the first joint exhibitions titled Rhenish Expressionists. These included Ernst Moritz Engert, Franz M. Jansen, Joseph Kölschbach, August Macke’s cousin Helmuth Macke, Carlo Mense, Heinrich Nauen, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Hans Thuar, Heinrich Campendonk, Franz Henseler and Max Ernst, who in his early paintings was, without doubt, an Expressionist before he became famous as Dada Max and the founder of Surrealism. However, the exhibition