German Expressionism

Deutung und Bewertung des Rilkeschen Lebenswerkes, insbesondere seiner »Duineser Elegien«, sind nach wie vor durch eine erstaunliche Unsicherheit gekennzeichnet. Dies erklärt sich wohl vor allem aus der weitgehenden Vernachlässigung bewußtseins- wie literaturgeschichtlicher Zusammenhänge in der bisherigen Forschung. Die Arbeit stellt daher die »Duineser Elegien« in den Kontext von Rilkes Gesamtwerk und versucht, ihre Eigenart und ihren Rang vor dem Hintergrund der deutschen Lyrik zwischen Jahrhundertwende und dem Beginn der zwanziger Jahre zu bestimmen. Da sie dabei die wesentlichen Züge der europäischen Modeme einbezieht, enthält die Studie auch den Entwurf einer Geschichte der modernen Lyrik und leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Formulierung eines Epochenbegriffs der »Modeme«. Mit Hilfe ausgewählter philosophischer wie literarischer Texte der Zeit skizziert sie ein Entwicklungsmodell, das den französischen Symbolismus, die deutsche Jahrhundertwende, die »klassische Modeme« und die Avantgarde (Futurismus, Expressionismus, Wortkunst und Dada) in ein überzeugendes Verhältnis zueinander bringt, und zeigt Grundstrukturen der modernen Lyrik auf.
In ständigem Wechsel mit diesen Kontexten werden die »Duineser Elegien« eingehend analysiert. Nach rezeptionsgeschichtlichen und rezeptionsästhetischen Vorüberlegungen untersucht die Arbeit im Detail das Motivgeflecht des Werkes, Rilkes Verwendung von Mythos, Metapher, Vergleich und Symbol sowie die Bauformen des Zyklus und die intendierte Leserhaltung. Sie weist nach, wie Rilkes Deutung der condition humaine, sein neuer Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Subjektivitätsentwurf, und der poetische Diskurs der »Elegien« zusammenhängen und grenzt sie von den radikaleren Experimenten der Avantgarde ab.

Between the gangsters, the beautiful girls, the vibrant nightlife and the gigantic scale of the city itself, full of its diverse millions and their struggles, the lurid and colorful world of Bangkok's notorious nightlife is brought to life in Chris Coles' series of Expressionist-style paintings. Broad sweeping lines and strong contrasting colors dominate in these artworks, portraying a chaotic edgy world of colliding intention and misplaced desire - lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation. At once beautiful and frightening, this collection of paintings is a vibrant celebration of the pyschedelic Bangkok Night and its many shades of noir...

Both in literature and art, exponents of modernism sought new forms of expression that took into account changes in the social, economic, technical and political conditions of the time. A similar trend towards questioning outmoded forms of representation and establishing new ways of seeing has become apparent in European comics since the 1980s, a development that was initiated primarily in Italy and France. In Murmure (1989), Lorenzo Mat- totti invokes expressionism and centres his mystical tale on the individual’s inner being. In rejecting the representational norms traditionally applied to comics, Nicolas de Crécy also shows his allegiance to modernism yet reflects in his absurdly hyperrealist work, Foligatto (1991), the grotesque images of Otto Dix. The following article demonstrates how the two artists, despite the deliberate reversion to early twentieth-century art common to both, have, each in his own way, established a new approach to seeing in comics.

Keywords: expressionism, Foligatto, Italy, modernism, Murmure, new objectivity

Metropolis  and  Our  Uncanny  Reality
Both Crary and Burch discuss the varying degrees and progression of different cinematic techniques and their effects on entertainment itself and the viewer. The progression of monocular and one-dimensional film into a more uncanny and three-dimensional experience creates disorientation between the subject and the viewer as experienced in Lang’s 1927 version of the acclaimed film Metropolis .

In this paper I tried to show that Franz Jungs novel "Gequaeltes Volk. Ein oberschlesischer Industrieroman" (roughly translated as "Tormented people. An industrial novel based in Upper Silesia") is an expressionistic piece of work which combines social and economic criticism Franz Jung based upon the situation in Upper Silesia around 1926/27.

This Hebrew essay illuminates central issues in two seminal texts written at the beginning of the twentieth century by the German Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler. Published as an afterword to the Hebrew edition of two short stories by Lasker-Schüler, The Nights of Tino of Baghdad (1907) and The Prince of Thebes (1914).

Abstract: The Cinema has undergone a transformation in recent years, and the societal thirst for horror begs an important question: why do so many of us enjoy being horrified, disturbed, or afraid? The virtual world of cinema's concept of utopia and dystopia has evolved. The horror genre has developed its aesthetics as a result of increased scholarship and attention over the last four to five decades. The search for the 'missing horizon' has spawned a slew of new cinematic theories. The majority of these horror film ideas are Freudian in nature, with a focus on the concepts of ‘repression’ and ‘release’. However, Noel Carroll's new concept of 'The Philosophy of Horror' examines the pleasure of horror films. He claims that the source of this pleasure is a special curiosity that produces a sense of ‘hope’. ‘Horror’ can be analysed form the dichotomy of Utopia and Dystopia- Heart and Hopes. This paper examines the most iconic and cult film, Robert Wiene's 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary'. The film has a powerful storyline of hope and despair, transporting spectators to 'La Shangrila land,' and then resolving the paradox to the simple joy of gore. It provides ‘spectacle horror' with fine camerawork, pacing, and an artistic splitter that add to the pure Hope in the pure Performance.

Аннотация: Георг Гейм-поэт, стоявший у истоков экспрессионистской лирики и заложивший основы поэтики этого направления. Его творчество, однако, является малоисследованным в российском научном пространстве. Одной из основных особенностей поэзии экспрессионизма было обширное использование цвета и цветовых метафор. Они были главным инструментом передачи смысла, настроения, тона стихотворения. В нашем исследовании мы осуществили попытку сопоставительного анализа раннего и позднего творчества Г. Гейма на предмет использования цветовых метафор с целью проследить эволюцию приема и динамику его развития. Также в задачи работы входило установление изменений в цветовых предпочтениях. Анализ проводился на примере 294 стихотворений раннего и позднего периодов творчества. Ключевые слова: Георг Гейм, экспрессионизм, цветовая метафора, XX в., символика цвета

This study has concentrated on women that have played a significant role in the advocacy of Modern German Art pertinent to the collection accommodated in Leicester.  The scarcity of opportunity for women to advance within a creative and educational habitat has been investigated. How the coinciding of political events, emancipation and artistic explosion characteristic of the Weimar era gave lone female voices the opportunity to be expressed. 
Prominence to the visual artistry within the Leicester collection of female practitioners like Gabriele Münter as well as less recognizable names like Renée Sintenis has been explored.  It has accentuated how artistic innovation and art groups like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter have alluded to unchartered equality and diversity, how the emergence of key German art movements propagated modernistic perspectives that women prospered within. 
What has been presented was an emphasis on expression rather than decoration. Thus the study uncovered relevant female strategies, émigrés adversities and the endurance of the art works preserved. The resolute determination of women collectors, Dr Rosa Schapire and Thekla Hess that remained obscured and deprecated, all culminated and found expression in the pre-eminent New Walk Museum and Art Gallery German Expressionist Collection, an encapsulation of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (total work of art) and the exhibitions thereby appertaining.
The patriarchal sphere that was enabled by the politics, environs and repercussions of WWII meant that women have endured marginalisation. The function that women enacted in the advocacy of Modern German Art has proven that women did, and remain defending and vocalising the promotion of what was classified as ‘degenerate’ art, with contemporary women championing outstanding scholarship.

KOLONIALES ERBE IM KUNSTMUSEUM EIN STUDIENTAG ANLÄSSLICH DER AUSTELLUNGEN "WHOSE EXPRESSION?" UND "TRANSITION EXHIBITION"
Die Forderung nach Dekolonisierung der Museen und kritischer Aufarbeitung kolonialer Wissensbestände stellt etablierte Formen der Museumsarbeit genauso wie kanonisierte Narrative der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung in Frage. Das Brücke-Museum in Berlin widmet sich in der Ausstellung "Whose Expression? Die Künstler der Brücke im kolonialen Kontext" der Frage, wie aktuelle Debatten um Rassismus und Kolonialismus den Blick auf Werk und Leben dieser Künstler verändern. Die Ausstellung "Transition Exhibition" im benachbarten Kunsthaus Dahlem präsentiert Karl Schmidt-Rottluffs Sammlung aus kolonialen Kontexten und positioniert sich kritisch zu tradierten Formen des Ausstellens. In Zusammenarbeit mit zeitgenössischen Künstler:innen entstehen neue Narrationen, die die Artefakte "re-aktivieren".

Charlotte Salomon was a painter belonging to the current of German Expressionism. Being a Jewish in the city of Berlin during 1930s, she was forced to move to the south of France to escape Nazism. There, by connecting her personal moving story to the tregedy of the time, she created a unique, multi-level and multi-modal piece of art that carries the memory of an individual, as well as of a people.

The mark of a major artist is the contribution, legacy and influence of his or her’s oeuvre on a time and place, which lives on after the artist has departed. For the German Expressionists, in particular, the Blaue Reiter group, the major artists were Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawelsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter. Credit for the establishment of the group is almost always given to Marc and Kandinsky, since they were the editors of the Blaue Reiter almanac and the name of the group was derived both from a love of horses on Marc’s part, Kandinsky’s affinity for riders and a shared love for the color blue, which represented spirituality. The Blaue Reiter group and the New Artists Society, as they were established, stood in opposition to the conventional nature of the academic art world and decadent society as a whole in Germany in the early 1900s, and sought to bring abstraction and Expressionism to the forefront. The theosophical and symbolist influences drove the artists in this collective to examine divine truths through art, while experimenting with various painting techniques and mediums. Although this group lacked an artistic manifesto, Kandinsky outlined the objectives for artists in this group in his essay, The Struggle for Art, published in 1911.  In it, Kandinsky points to six major characteristics of the duty of an artist:
Man,…consists of two elements: the internal and the external.
The interior element of a man, or the inner person, remains in continuous contact with the internal aspect of the world that surrounds him. This contact is inescapable.
The complete harmony of the work of art is therefore the ultimate balance between the internal and the external, i.e, between content and form.
The connection between the work of art and the artist impresses upon the former a stamp of the artist’s personality, his style.
Thus, in every work of art, two styles are to be found: that of the “individual” and that of the “school.”
Since our inner life (like any visible form of life) is ordered according to plan and purpose, the expression of this life demands a planned and purposeful form.
Thus, even today, the absolute necessity in art of plan and purpose, i.e, of construction—is quite clear. Every contemporary artist must inevitably make his creation meet this requirement.

Despite the fact that Kandinsky identified the artist as a man, I seek to argue that Münter expressed these edicts to the fullest capacity throughout the course of her long career and for that, her rank within this group should be elevated.

The article’s point of departure is an exhibition from 1955,
popularly known as the ‘Arsenal’, which holds an important
place in Polish art historiography. The showing was
a forum where discussions reflecting the then current cultural
policy of the state’s authorities were intensified and
superimposed with individual attitudes of artists towards
this cultural policy of the state and with reminiscences of
the wartime past. The present analysis focuses mainly on
the phenomenon of expressive figuration that has been
much discussed in literature dealing with the ‘Arsenal’
and sparked numerous polemics. An aspect rarely examined
by scholars dealing with the ‘Arsenal’, namely, a reference
to historical, cultural and political conditions that
had shaped the reception of expressive figuration in Germany,
the ‘homeland of expressionism’ – and a country
that at that time had served as an important point of reference
for Poland’s identity – allows for viewing the presentation
of Polish artists at the ‘Arsenal’ in a broader comparative
context of the post-war ‘controversy of images’.

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

https://iupress.org/9780253052001/yiddish-writers-in-weimar-berlin/

En comparant l’approche particulière du nu par les peintres de Die Brücke avec celle de Matisse, Derain et Van Dongen, ce texte propose une variation dans l’appréciation du lien entre l'homme et la nature traité de manière spécifique par les artistes allemands en raison de leur désir de communion dans l'art comme dans la vie.

En el presente escrito se analiza la ambigüedad que presenta el expresionismo como movimiento de vanguardia y los conflictos estilísticos de cine expresionista alemán, dando cuenta de la potente influencia que tiene el romanticismo alemán en dicha corriente.

Une histoire globale des avant-gardes picturales se doit d’expliquer pourquoi celles-ci apparurent en certains endroits et pas en d’autres, comment elles circulaient entre les pays et les capitales, ce qui les portait et si elles rompaient réellement avec leur temps, sachant que la plupart finirent par connaître une véritable canonisation.
Les avant-gardes lièrent leur sort au développement des journaux et des revues, c’est-à-dire à celui des techniques d’impression et de reproduction en série. Elles profitèrent également d’un vaste mouvement de circulation des idées, des hommes et des objets avec le développement des réseaux ferrés et des transports maritimes.
Dans le même temps se forgeaient les identités nationales, férues de tradition et de préservation des cultures. L’approche géopolitique met au jour ce processus par lequel les plasticiens novateurs recoururent à la référence étrangère pour s’opposer aux institutions nationales, travaillèrent à internationaliser leurs réputations pour mieux s’imposer contre le refus de l’innovation porté par le nationalisme, ou, au contraire, se laisser récupérer par des partis nationalistes et révolutionnaires.
Mais à côté des stratégies, réseaux et marchés, place est faite à l’analyse du contexte culturel et moral, économique et politique, matériel et social, affectif et spirituel des artistes des avant-gardes à partir de 1848. Jusqu’à la rupture de 1920, quand ces avant-gardes deviennent politiques, plaçant l’avenir de l’art dans celui de la Révolution.

Ces notes sur Nosferatu le vampire (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau 1922) ne mettent l’accent que sur des questions de technique cinématographique, de narratologie et de scénographie. Pour les questions thématiques, civilisationnelles, les liens avec l’histoire de l’art et avec les autres œuvres du metteur en scène, de nombreux ouvrages sont disponibles.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (Ed.)
Botanical Drift
Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium

Contributions by David Edward Allen & Maria Buzhor, Rebecca Anderson, Bergit Arends & Sunoj D, Connie Butler & Hazel Dowling, Caroline Cornish & Mark Nesbitt, Alfred Döblin, Natasha Eaton, Germaine Greer, Kim Berit Heppelmann, Emma Waltraud Howes, Melanie Jackson, Alana Jelinek, Philip Kerrigan, Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones, Claire Loussouarn, Wietske Maas, Natasha Myers, Matteo Pasquinelli, Raqs Media Collective, herman de vries, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plant diversification, species cultivation, and destruction—past and present, extant and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored as commodities and colonial as well as decolonial devices by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives. Reflecting on experimental ecology—the undiscovered, underestimated, and undesired non-European flora and fauna—it challenges perception and inspires potentialities to bring new understandings of the undergrowth of the Kew Gardens botany collection.

December 2017, English
16.7 x 23 cm, 240 pages, color and b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-353-0

Abstract:
The Cinema has undergone a transformation in recent years, and the societal thirst for horror begs an important question: why do so many of us enjoy being horrified, disturbed, or afraid? The virtual world of cinema's concept of utopia and dystopia has evolved. The horror genre has developed its aesthetics as a result of increased scholarship and attention over the last four to five decades. The search for the 'missing horizon' has spawned a slew of new cinematic theories. The majority of these horror film ideas are Freudian in nature, with a focus on the concepts of ‘repression’ and ‘release’. However, Noel Carroll's new concept of 'The Philosophy of Horror' examines the pleasure of horror films. He claims that the source of this pleasure is a special curiosity that produces a sense of ‘hope’. ‘Horror’ can be analysed form  the dichotomy of Utopia and Dystopia- Heart and Hopes. This paper examines the most iconic and cult film, Robert Wiene's 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary'. The film has a powerful storyline of hope and despair, transporting spectators to 'La Shangrila land,' and then resolving the paradox to the simple joy of gore. It provides ‘spectacle horror' with fine camerawork, pacing, and an artistic splitter that add to the pure Hope in the pure Performance.