Expressive!

by Paul Gauguin, Markus Bruderlin, Donald B. Kuspit

The quality of expressiveness--an outcry of the human soul against the mechanization of life--runs like a red scar through the entire history of modern art and up to the present day. If expressionism is associated first and foremost with the German contribution to Modernism, evoking the artists associated with Die Brcke (Kirchner, Heckel and Nolde) and Der Blaue Reiter (Marc and Kandinsky), but also the Austrian Schiele and Kokoshka, and the Parisian fauves, it nevertheless goes further. Beginning with the fathers of expressionism, Gauguin, van Gogh and Munch, the most important inspirations for a movement laden with emotions and endowed with the furor of rebellion, the red scar bleeds through the expressive tendencies of the interwar artists (Beckmann, Soutine and Picasso) and the postwar artists (Dubuffet, de Kooning and Bacon), and all the way to neo-expressionism (Baselitz, Lpertz, Lassnig) and 80s neo-fauvism (Clemente, Basquiat and Disler), ending with Louise Bourgeois and Bruce Nauman. In accompanying essays, philosopher and art historian Donald Kuspit sets out to trace the meaning of the term "expressive"; curator Markus Brderlin explores expressionism by looking backwards from neo-expressionism; and numerous short texts round off the exploration by focusing on individual works of art.

Genres: Art

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

About the author

Gauguin was a financially successful stockbroker and self-taught amateur artist when he began collecting works by the impressionists in the 1870s. Inspired by their example, he took up the study of painting under Camille Pissarro. Pissarro and Edgar Degas arranged for him to show his early painting efforts in the fourth impressionist exhibition in 1879 (as well as the annual impressionist exhibitions held through 1882). In 1882, after a stock market crash and recession rendered him unemployed and broke, Gauguin decided to abandon the business world to pursue life as an artist full-time.

In 1886, Gauguin went to Pont-Aven in Brittany, a rugged land of fervently religious people far from the urban sophistication of Paris. There he forged a new style. He was at the center of a group of avant-garde artists who dedicated themselves to synthétisme, ordering and simplifying sensory data to its fundamentals. Gauguin's greatest innovation was his use of color, which he employed not for its ability to mimic nature but for its emotive qualities. He applied it in broad flat areas outlined with dark paint, which tended to flatten space and abstract form. This flattening of space and symbolic use of color would be important influences on early twentieth-century artists.

In Brittany, Gauguin had hoped to tap the expressive potential he believed rested in a more rural, even "primitive" culture. Over the next several years he traveled often between Paris and Brittany, spending time also in Panama and Martinique. In 1891 his rejection of European urban values led him to Tahiti, where he expected to find an unspoiled culture, exotic and sensual. Instead, he was confronted with a world already transformed by western missionaries and colonial rule. In large measure, Gauguin had to invent the world he sought, not only in paintings but with woodcarvings, graphics, and written works. As he struggled with ways to express the questions of life and death, knowledge and evil that preoccupied him, he interwove the images and mythology of island life with those of the west and other cultures. After a trip to France (1893 to 1895), Gauguin returned to spend his remaining years, marred by illness and depression, in the South Seas.