Graphics from Germany

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33883, 1 July 1975, Page 10

Graphics from Germany

An exhibition of prints from a period generally regarded as one of the most important in modern art history — Germany before and between the wars — will open in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery on Friday.

“The Graphic Art of German Expressionism” features 118 etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts by Max Beckman, Heinrick Campendonk, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz March, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Christian Rohlfs, and Karl SchmidtRottluff.

The exhibition was organ-

ised by the German Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations, and the New Zealand tour has been arranged by the National Art Gallery, with assistance from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. German expressionist artists raised the power of pure colour to previously unknown intensity, writes Horst Keller in an introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition. They ignored the question of truth to nature, overstepped the bounds of convention, ignored the expected and conventionally acceptable, and, in so doing, became objects of hatred and mockery. Only a few of the original Expressionists survived the First World War years. The Expressionists remained individuals, hacking out a patient path of creation. They

lived through an age of dawning truth, of painful experience of the world; consequently they said farewell to the beauty of things, to the traditional ideals of pictorial value. The prestige of the studio declined, the greatness of the academies was put in question, and the position of the artists brought into doubt. The gulf between the ordinary citizen and the painter grew deeper, as the creative artist sought to shock the viewer.

The essence of Expressionist graphic art was that it should be forceful, an arresting pictorial statement posing questions about life. The graphic art of Expressionism concerns mankind in our day just as much as in the earlier years of the century, writes Mr Keller. "It summons us to fulfil oar pic-

torial visions, to re-live our destiny, to read with new eyes the phenomenon of man.”

The language of the print is a disciplined one. “Whether the invention is a shorthand note composed of strokes, an enigmatic form standing out on a black ground and fading back into darkness, or whether a form rises before us, completely filling the painting or print, as is often the case in Beckmann’s etchings, or whether we must interpret anew the situation of man or the human countenance, the record is always compelling, to the point that the spectator’s imagination is fully engaged,” Mr Keller writes.

The exhibition will remain in the gallery until July 24.