German Expressionism
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Begins: Tuesday 10 November 2020
Until: Tuesday 8 December 2020
(2-4 pm (NB: dates/times subject to change)) - Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
- 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
No one could accuse the German Expressionists of doing things by halves. As this statement indicates, members of the famous Blue Rider group saw their art as an instrument for spiritual renewal. For another band of youthful artists in this story – 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 to be encountered here include, but are not limited to: pantheistic harmonies in the paintings of Franz Marc; 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 Kokoschka and Egon Schiele; Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘gospel of expressionism’; apocalyptic visions in painting and poetry; political activism and religious piety at the dawn of democracy; early Bauhaus and expressionist cinema.
Week 1. Visions of Utopia in art of Die Brücke 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.
Completed