German Expressionism
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Begins: Monday 13 September 2021
Until: Monday 11 October 2021
(2-4pm) - Lettsom House, First Floor, 11 Chandos Street, London W1G 9EB (NB: There is no lift in this building)
- Lecturer: Niccola Shearman
‘We are standing at the threshold of one of the greatest epochs that mankind has ever experienced – the epoch of the great spirituality’. Wassily Kandinsky, 1911
Members of the famous Blue Rider group saw their art as an instrument for spiritual renewal. For another band of youthful artists – The Bridge – the necessary change required urgent commitment to physical freedoms, exercised in art as in life. Examining the radiant colour, dynamic rhythms and varied themes of expressionist art from its Utopian beginnings around 1905 until its eclipse after war and revolution, this course provides a thorough introduction to the core principles and key figures of the movement in Germany and in Austria. Artists, ideas and multiple art forms include: the nude and the image of the ‘exotic other’ in the work of E.L. Kirchner and associates; pioneering women from Kӓthe Kollwitz to Marianne Werefkin; graphic arts and periodicals; psycho-sexual exposures from Oskar Kokokscha and Egon Schiele; Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘gospel of expressionism’; early Bauhaus and expressionist cinema.
Week 1. Visions of Utopia in art of Die Brϋcke and der Blaue Reiter
Week 2. Harmony and chaos: rural retreat and big-city thrills
Week 3. Vienna: dreaming youths, exquisite façades and ugly truths
Week 4. Shattered Visions: German artists and the First World War
Week 5. Castles in the Air: Expressionism’s last high after 1918
Lecturer
Dr Niccola Shearman is an independent art historian and freelance lecturer in the field of twentieth-century German and Austrian art. Educated at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, her doctorate concerned the German modernist print in the aftermath of the First World War. She has been associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute and the University of Manchester and is a regular contributor to Courtauld Short Courses and to the V&A Academy. In 2025 she was co-curator, with Emily Christensen, of With Graphic Intent, German and Austrian modernist works on paper, at the Courtauld Gallery. Publications include academic articles, book reviews and exhibition catalogue essays. Current research concerns Viennese artists and art historians in exile in London and New York.
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