Puzzle Arte’s favorite German painters are Franz Marc and Paul Klee . But alongside them, Austrian painters such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt also enjoy the same cultural and artistic influence. In the second half of the 19th century, France most strongly influenced international painting trends. And at the beginning of the 20th century, this role passed to Austria and Germany. First Vienna, then Munich, Dresden, and Berlin became the most influential centers in the world of painting.
Among the German Romantic painters, Caspar David Friedrich stands out. He embodies the pictorial movement of the time, which focuses on landscape, nature, and the aspiration to the sublime. His depictions are evocative and melancholic: silent forests, expanses of sea, and snow-capped mountains. Friedrich exalts the spectacular Nordic landscape with intense psychological expressiveness. The sentiment celebrated in his works is never violent, but rather sad and contemplative. The man he portrays in his landscapes is contemplative. He is searching for an unattainable goal, loves solitude, and has a restless soul. He expresses a constant melancholy, enveloped in a consuming yearning caused by nostalgia. His indefinable and tormenting longing is well captured in “Wanderer Above the Sea of ​​Fog.” This is also one of the most representative works of German Romanticism.
This work is charged with symbolism: man contemplates nature and confronts the immensity of the cosmos. Silent, mysterious, and inaccessible. Another interpretation is that of a metaphor of the soul in the presence of God. At the end of his earthly journey, man must continue toward the unknown. In his works, Friedrich did not seek to express objectivity, but contemplation and interpretation.
In addition to Friedrich, the representative German painters of Romanticism are the painter Philipp Otto Runge, Gerhard von Kügelgen. In addition to the Nazarene painters, Adrian Ludwig Richter. But also Carl Spitzweg, Eberhard Wächter, John Constemba. And Christian Clausen Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, Ernst Ferdinand Oeheme and Kersting.
Expressionism was popular among German painters in the first two decades of the 20th century. It expressed the artist’s propensity to exalt, by exaggerating, the emotional side of reality over the objective. Germany was the scene of this movement at least until 1925. Expressionism proposed a revolution in language that contrasted the objectivity of Impressionism with its unfounded subjectivity. The essence of Expressionism produced a rebellion of the spirit against matter.
Expressionism was devoted to social issues and the dramatic testimony of reality: war, political contradictions, the loss of values, class struggles. Not to mention a harsh critique of bourgeois society. Hence the alienation of the world of work, the positivist view of the world. The theoretical and cultural premises of Expressionism lie in the thought of Sigmund Freud and the Frenchman Henri Bergson. The artists expressed tensions, moods, and feelings through the violence of color. In addition to the synthesis of form, the incisiveness of the line. The favorite subjects were nudes, landscapes, scenes of everyday life, and cities.
The most important German Expressionist painters were Lyonel Feininger, Franz Marc , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, and Egon Schiele. The Expressionist cultural movement also manifested itself in literature, theater, and the nascent German cinema. The excitement of a new social order had been fueled by the First World War. It was fomented not only by the Reich’s military but also by intellectuals. The hope was for the purification of Europe. And to achieve the annihilation of the ancient powers, culture would not be enough. An apocalypse was needed.
For this reason, many artists volunteered to fight at the front. Horror engulfed ideals and prevailed over art. Indeed, after the war, a more realistic current of Expressionism took hold. The leading exponents of this new vision were Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz.
Between 1905 and 1911, Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was born in Munich and Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden, attracting Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky to Germany. Two widely read magazines fueled stylistic, philosophical, and political debate in Berlin: Der Sturm and Die Aktion.
Indeed, 20th-century German painters can be traced back to the Die Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups. The former was founded in Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. They depicted the suffering of the human condition. But they also exalted the spontaneity of inspiration through violent deformation of bodies. They also extolled the exaggeration of color and an incisive, immediate language. Their style is based on the use of violent, unnatural colors and harsh, broken lines. The goal is to communicate, with impetuous violence, a dramatic and pessimistic vision of society. The intense, primordial naturalism was well expressed by Emil Nolde, along with Max Pechstein, Otto Müller, César Klein, and Karl Hubbuch. They depicted an increasingly obsessive and psychological tension, reflected in descriptions of grotesque mundane environments. In fact, after the First World War it transformed into a social satire.
In the following decades, this movement influenced other artists. In 1911, Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. This artistic experience can still be classified as Expressionism, but it translated into a romantic form of Orphism. That is, an attempt to unite the painter’s spirit with the pulsating soul of the universe. The “Blue Rider” was a far-reaching phenomenon, in which the language of color became increasingly free and intense. Thanks to Kandinsky’s influence, artists implemented new modes of expression, imaginary spaces, and the lyrical and fantastical abstraction of reality.
Contemporary German painters have addressed war, communism, and major social changes. Hence, a strong tendency toward abstraction. From Gerhard Richter’s blurry realism to Candida Höfer’s empty social spaces, to the murals of MadC. Richter, for example, is a surrealist famous for his blurry portraits. His philosophy is “to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.” Then we find Isa Genzken, who works with photography, video, collage, and film. She is renowned for her sculpture, and her most famous work is “Rose,” an eight-meter-tall enameled steel rose permanently installed outside the Leipzig Messe.
Next came Wolfgang Beltracchi, Germany’s most famous art forger. He realized he shouldn’t just copy existing paintings, but also produce those known to be lost. That is, he had to arrange for them to be magically discovered at a sale or in an attic and then auctioned off. Photographer Candida Höfer, on the other hand, became famous for her large-scale images of empty public spaces like banks, offices, and waiting rooms. One of her later series features images of the Louvre Museum with no one in sight.
Neo Rauch is an artist of the imagination. He is celebrated worldwide for his vivid use of color and the juxtaposition of figurative and abstract elements. Indeed, his work is influenced by Magritte and De Chirico. Finally, we find MadC, aka Claudia Walde, who painted her first graffiti piece in 1996 at the age of 16. She considers graffiti the best way to express herself, as it is the final product that is most important. In addition to spray paint, she also uses ink, acrylic, and watercolors. In 2010, her 700-square-meter mural “700-Wall” launched her onto the international art scene.
