Expressionism concerns the autonomy of consciousness and that issue runs deep in the German psyche.
Expressionism was a short lived art movement mostly in Germany in the three decades before, during, and after the First World War that included figures like Eric Nolde and Ernst Kirschner and Otto Dix though some art critics stretch the term to include some Picasso (who, after all, tried a bit of everything), El Greco’s “View of Toledo” (which was religiously inspired while Expressionists were not) and Vincent Van Gogh (who used bright colors and so was very different from Expressionists). The idea of Expressionism, critics generally agree, is that it was an attempt to externalize the feelings within people rather than to accurately portray what the external world looked like. That is true as far as it goes, but that does not explain how the actual features of the art convey the apparently other-worldly and cynical view of the scenes represented and what places them in the social context of Germany at that time. Go back to the elements employed in these paintings of Eric Ludwig Kirshner, the movement’s most central figure, to answer the question.
Here is Kirshner’s “Berlin Street Scene” from 1915, one of his many presentations of fancy ladies, some of them prostitutes, but not in this painting. These are sophisticated people. The look still predates the Flapper Age, with its short skirts and tiny bosoms, but the women are able to look classy, what with their well tailored dresses, both vividly red and blue, and with fancy hats. The women have shadowed eyes and pale faces while a man among them is smoking a cigarette, a sign of liberation from conventionality, as is the straightforward gazes of the women. Aesthetically pleasing and a bit different is that the red dress is to be contrasted with so many men and women dressed in blue, these accented with yellow highlights. What is the significance of this presentation?
Adopting Barrington Moore Jr.’s view that democracy proceeds from West to East and stymied by the remaining presence of a peasant class, industrialization also moved West to East and was more unsettling as it became ever more abrupt. English industrialization was home grown and developed in the Eighteenth Century when the steam engine allowed for efficient coal mining and common people flocked to the cities to get jobs in the new industries. France did not make that transformation until Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, and Russia did not industrialize until the Twentieth Century, while the change over in Germany, the marvel of it, was the generation before the First World War. Berlin was a young and adventurous city. The point about these sophisticated Berlin women was that Berlin had emerged rapidly in the last generation as a world class city replete with the most advanced Western culture and the latest trends and fashions accompanied with a subway and an electricity driven montage of lighted ads and internal combustion engine autos.
Look more deeply than to the audacious contemporary of “Berlin Street Scene” by turning to Kirschner’s “Street, Dresden '' from 1906. Rather than the later sarcastic view of women primping and showing off in their pointed angularity, a comment about fashion and being fashionable, the earlier painting tries to get to the experience of what it is to meet people on the street. The essential quality of those people encountered is that they are fleshy rather than fleshed out. They are people caught in passing for a moment and so no more than dots of eyes on doughty faces, these distinguished by different skin shades even if we would all consider them white, some of them pale and some yellowish and some more red. The oval faces make them all somehow familiar even if they are strangers to others and by implication to themselves, people knowing others see us as strangers on the street.
It is also important to look at the color of the dresses in “Street, Dresden”. As with skin tone, the painting is more realistic than an Impressionist point of view might imagine them to be. One woman wears a striking yellow jacket over her blue skirt. The dress is partly continued by the yellow theme in another part of the painting but that does not dissuade the viewer from seeing the color scheme as disjointed and a bit ugly, perhaps because the jacket is not quite pure yellow, the dress admixed to make it a bit off. The dresses of the adjoining women have red dresses that are also not primary and somehow clash with the other dresses. This seems realistic rather than as is usually thought as the imposition by Expressionists by strange and clashing colors because, in fact, people do not wear their clothes to coordinate with the people they will meet. The actual scene is of whatever collection of colors is a happenstance and so a jumble.
The colors used in Kirshner and other Expressionists is akin to what happens in architecture. Yes, there were planned residences in Berlin at the time just as the design for the apartments in Bath, England had been designed to provide a unified presentation of an oval of similar heighted houses. That provided a very pleasing environment. The same thing happened when the Lincoln Center area in New York was razed so as to build a set of coordinated buildings, much to the chagrin of those who preferred the helter skelter version of Times Square as an entertainment venue. Most of the time, most architectural places are also a jumble of buildings from different periods and contrasting styles, disproportionate in scale and in a variety of styles tight next to one another and buildings in various states of repair. The same is true of people on the street. The actual scene is of whatever collection of colors is a happenstance and so a jumble.
Compare the color schemes of Impressionism against which the Expressionists were answering. Impressionist painters presented a number of distinct and fresh colors into their paletes and were able to combine different colors on the same painting as well as make some of the paintings monochromatic. But the Impressionists maintained a uniform and well integrated set of colors in any particular painting and so it can be said that part of the Impressionist mode was to maintain a pleasing and integrating point of view on color so that the color scheme of a painting was independent of its subject. It is therefore fair to say that Impressionist color was a conventionalized idea of culture that, in fact, is true in most of the history of painting. Expressionism, for its part, is thought to have applied conventionalism to color in its preferences for dark colors and the use of green and red even on faces. But the Expressionists were a breakthrough in that there was no longer a need to make the colors uniform but, to the contrary, discordant with one another, answering to how reality itself was a jumble of colors that did not match in some sense with one another. That revolution in color is one of the things that might make Expressionism unsettling and even temporary as a movement because it was so wedded to its limited and strange color range. But that is to forget that Rembrandt and Turner were themselves, each on their own, also wedded with their own color schemes which are acceptable because they are their signature tones and so the ways they each saw the world.
Here is a Kirchner landscape, “The Red Tower in Halle'', that reveals Kirshner’s ways for doing a landscape. The title is itself curious in that the color of the painting as a whole is blue and the tower, not named as a church though it has the steepled shape of one, and is largely black, although the viewer notes, as an afterthought, that the bottom stories of the central structure is not red either but a kind of orange, that color wandering across the painting through the depiction of an orange train atop an orange embankment, which suggests just how large and majestic the structure is. Otherwise, there are shades of blue to color the area surrounding the tower and also white clouds behind. There is what might be a large plaza around the tower, residential or commercial buildings considerably distant from the tower, but there is no hard evidence for the plaza except its existence as an expanse of space in that there are no indications of the cafes or the statutes that might be present in a plaza that surrounds a significant structure. There are no people depicted though they are presumed to exist in that there is a trolley tram traversing the area. The tower seems like a force field repelling away any other structures around it so as to expand that undescribed space, and so suggests that the mind observes that a space worthy of the tower has to be pushed away so as to allow the tower its stature. Architects make what minds need.
What is to be made of a landscape divested of its accouterments? “The Red Tower in Halle” can be understood as getting down to essentials by eliminating detail. It just shows blocks of figures, the buildings behind, the spaces around the tower, and the tower itself, experienced as enormous in its setting, towering over the area. That is what is important about the scene: its relative sizes and clearances and the overall blue and darkened hue as if the eye had squinted to see what was really there. That is what it is like to have a feel for a place as opposed to when you see the cafes on the Champs Elysee. Notice how shocking is the contrast to Monet on Rheims, where the details of the stone are reflected differently in different parts of a day’s sunlight. Rather than charmed by the light, the sight is imposing with its gloomy grandeur because of its raw comparative sizes. It is not a stretch to say that Kirshner is onto a phenomenological perspective: to perceive perception as elemental experiences fundamental to the ways of the mind even if people can only with difficulty are able to become aware of what the way their minds work, in this case through blocks father than things and spaces rather than people. This is a new vision not quite lost once seen, while Impressionism, as I have said, remains faithful to its real world surroundings and its details and its color harmony, an artistic addition to the world rather than what an essential mind would garner.
Expressionist painting, even if partly a portrayal of what was fashionable and an artistic movement only temporarily in style, was primarily concerned with consciousness. Even pre-Flapper dress and faces evoked the emotional tones at the core of these people: daring in dress and manner so as to show their independence. People are like autos in that they have so many styles and colors, each one is perceived by the pedestrian as each to display a type. Each is a kind of personality, as happens when seeing distinct people on the street, each one a type of itself, somehow assembling its own dress and posture and expression. What they are is what counts. That is also true about the structures of consciousness itself. Places seem to bend as shapes are fitted to be placed into the ways the mind will allow them to be organized. Painting therefore illuminates what is invisible and difficult to appreciate by objectifying the ways the mind works.
The conventional and to my mind correct explanation for the depthlessness, the profundity, of German art, literature and thought is that they are all derived from Luther’s perception that religion is found as mediated through consciousness, in that the consciousness is altered by religion rather than that supernatural events intrude in life and people do rituals so as to alter events, which is the case in Catholicism. Kant is the most significant of the German achievements in reducing into secular terms the idea of duty and free will and logical thinking itself as the way consciousness works. Expressionism is a recent version of the attempt to show that to see something is to unfold the way consciousness works, the world perceived from the building blocks of consciousness. That view seems to me, as I say, very deep, even if I think David Hume and G. E. Moore are more accurate in describing the way emotions, social life and ethics work.
It is a mistake, however, to think that German thought would inevitably descend into Hitler, which is what Erich Fromm thought in his “Escape From Freedom'' because that is to look only at one aspect of the Luther heritage. Expressionists, like Heidigger and his student Sartre, are concerned with the experiences of being rather than how to enter a cul de sac where freedom comes from paradoxically denying it. Rather, the contours of consciousness are inexhaustible in themselves. Were it not for a few mistakes, such as Breuning thinking he could control Hitler, the whole Hitler episode would never have happened and Expressionism could have lingered for much longer and to rival the Abstract Expressionism that claimed American artistic taste. Remember that Ernest Lubitch, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder did well in the United States, maintaining their senses of cosmopolitan cynicism, although bereft of their color, while Thomas Mann “colors” and plumage are vibrant and dark in “Joseph and His Brothers”, even if it was written when he was briefly resident in Los Angeles.