On Art

...The exhibition illustrates the force of Expressionist thought, style and technique existent throughout Europe and...

...There was a sweet landscape by Hans Bohler that might have been a latter-day Impressionist work...

...Expressionism grew out of radical political beliefs and a cultivated sexuality, and these disorderly ambitions are central to an understanding of the work...

...It was not confined to Germany, as is commonly thought...

...The Marlborough-Gerson Gallery's recent exhibition, International Expressionism Part I (a second installment featuring more recent and more abstract painting is promised for the fall), did not alleviate the confusion...

...But it has not had the accredited genealogy of abstract art, or the critical interest and support that has maintained the abstract tradition in the forefront of the history of modern art...

...The erratic selection of works in International Expressionism Part I was not particularly helpful for formulating a definition...

...Mondrian and the geometric style represent the first and most successful effort to put painting on a rational basis, beyond emotional liabilities...

...Indeed, one can read the mainstream development of contemporary art as an attempt to structure out precisely those traumatic aspects of life that German Expressionism favored...

...Like the works of the Northern Expressionists, the sybaritic, sun-drenched canvases of Matisse, Vlaminck, De-rain and the other Fauves are subjectively heightened, but toward a euphoria of Dionysian joyousness rather than toward guilt-ridden melancholy...

...The style remains a very mixed bag in the history of modern art, including certain German and Viennese artists of the first three decades of the 20th century, a few early progenitors like Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Lovis Corinth, and such long-lived advocates as Oskar Kokoschka and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff...

...Figurative painting, occupying a middle ground, has been forced to adapt the discoveries of modernism to its more conservative intentions...

...Weber's important work was done under the influence of Cubism...

...To bring order to this chaos, then, an expert knowledge of history, a sensitivity to the intentions of the Expressionist style, and—to make the strongest case for the importance of the movement—a ruthless selectivity in the choice of representative works are required...

...it developed from the regional Expressionism of Thomas Hart Benton and the savage distortion of Picasso...

...1 think there is another tradition in modern art—a figurative tradition—made up of movements like Fauvism and Expressionism and the accomplishments of individual artists like Bonnard and Matisse...

...Emotion, raw or otherwise, has been a suspect quality in modern art...

...Although the two styles sometimes overlapped technically in their vivid, psychological use of color, and their exhilarating brushwork, Expressionism and Fauvism are distinct entities...

...Though there were several reasons for its decline —rapid academization, the glut of second- and third-hand followers?it is also apparent now that its polemicists misjudged the strength of the prevailing winds of formalism...

...Unless one maintains the necessary distinctions, the term will become falsified and useless...

...It was the French works—a splendid Matisse portrait, Olga Mer-son, a characteristic Raoul Dufy, Delaunay's Tower on the Champs de Mars—that gave one the feeling the term was being used with such elasticity it could encompass all figurative painting...

...The term covers a wider range...

...not all Fauve painting is incorrigibly sunny...

...Applied first to those German painters who adapted various French technical modes (Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism) to personal ends, it is now used to describe most forms of painting that rely more on expressive force and brusque handling than on structural clarity...

...In attempting to broaden the concept, to establish a wider historical frame of reference for the Expressionist style, the Marlborough-Gerson show ought to have been more conscientious in its choices...

...The history of abstract art seems to move forward with irresistible logic, analyzing, in turn, each new set of formal problems...

...Paul Rebeyrolle's Le Canard is quite simply that: a dead duck in any style...

...For the "cool" modes of the moment, there is little concern with responsiveness to emotional pressures...

...The critical notions that cluster around a new style, therefore, are of some consequence...

...It seems plausible that the early demise of Abstract Expressionism was partially a case of bad public relations...

...His brief introduction to the Marlborough-Gerson show was all right...

...it seemed to combine erotic yearnings, the hope of Christian redemption, and a declaration of proletarian sympathies...

...It featured some obvious choices: the erotic idylls of Otto Miiller—angular nudes sporting in dappled glades?the sleek animal studies of Franz Marc...

...Abraham Rattner's Christ and Two Soldiers, whatever its religious content, is adulterated Cubism...

...He is the Director of the Rose Art Museum and Poses Institute of Fine Arts at Brandeis University, and the opening of the exhibition was held for the benefit of the National Women's Committee of Brandeis...

...What about an old style like Expressionism, which today embraces (as the Marlborough-Gerson show did) both Jackson Pollock and Emil Nolde...

...The Fauve painters, however wild, were exponents of traditional French fac-ture...

...In the past Seitz, a former Associate Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, has given us such carefully selected, tendentious exhibitions as Monet's late paintings and The Responsive Eye, a razzle-dazzle exhibition of current optical art...

...But where the exhibition included the gloomy religious symbolism of Rouault, it omitted the embittered social commentaries of George Grosz...

...In scale, it tried to be a moderately-sized museum exhibition, yet it resembled nothing so much as that "loose and baggy monster" Henry James once forlornly characterized as the novel...

...We are beginning to see, too, that the style was less anti-formalist than it was purported to be, that in a painter like Franz Kline, for example, the dramatic, gestural swathes of black paint were locked into a rigorous and hard-won structuralism...

...In calling for less angst and more joie de vivre within the category, however, he is oversimplifying the case...

...Hard-core Expressionism—that is, German Expressionism with its erotic drives, its political and social concerns—remains one of the greatest movements within the figurative tradition...

...Max Beckmann, who forged Expressionism into a vehicle for elaborate social and personal allegories, was represented by a forceful canvas, The Bath, and a beautiful dusky blue still life...

...Not all German Expressionist painting is self-tormented...

...they exemplified another variant upon the cool and resourceful formalism of the School of Paris...

...Hartley's Expressionism was an historical extension, evolving from his affiliation with German artists prior to World War I. Pollock's Expressionism, in his semi-figurative work, had a different artistic patrimony...

...The style shared many attributes with the earlier German Expressionism—expressive handling, a sensitivity to the pressures of life, personal emotion—but having been freed from strict representationalism, it occupied the more elevated plateaus of abstraction...

...In recent years, the chief reversal to this formalist trend was, supposedly, the Abstract Expressionist movement—an art of action, as it was termed, in which the painter enacted on the canvas an unrehearsed "moment" out of his life and feelings...

...In stressing Expressionist art's subjective element, in locating its area of concern in the realm of personal emotion, with the claims of life as pre-eminent as the claims of art...

...In its fervid emotionalism this was an authentic example of the Expressionist spirit...

...Executed in Hartley's late primitive style, it featured a tiny-headed, big-bodied Christ held in the lap of a working man, fronting a chorus line of barechested, brawny types in blue denim trousers...

...Seitz is undoubtedly right...

...One could only guess what the painting was about...

...Thus it is applied to both figurative and abstract painting and accommodates such diverse figures as Marsden Hartley and Jackson Pollock, American artists separated by a generation...

...While the exhibition included several superb paintings, too many pictures were indifferent, questionable, or merely available for the showing...

...later, in America...

...Why, therefore, must this instrumental concept be applied only to expressions of anxiety, frustration, alienation and tragic emotion...

...there were several writhing and tortured landscapes by Chaim Soutine issued out of the School of Paris...

...the paintings, or many of them, were all wrong...

...Max Weber's late paintings, for instance, are mildly Expres-sionistic, but they are feeble works...

...In America, the Expressionist heritage is, perhaps, more complicated...

...Seitz' predicament, one suspects, produced the cautious disclaimer at the beginning of the catalogue which noted that the show "does not claim to be a comprehensive survey...

...One of the most horrendous works in the exhibition was Marsden Hartley's Christ Held by Half-Naked Men, a painting so awful as to be unforgettable...

...William C. Seitz wrote the introductory text for the catalogue...

...The gist of Seitz' critical approach to the Expressionist tangle can best be summed up by his concluding remarks: "Thus conceived—as a definable relationship between the self, the medium and the world—Expressionism can be recognized as a widely dispersed component of contemporary art...