The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy

Walter Gramatté, "Die grosse Angst (Selbstportrat, Kopf im Halbprofil nach rechts)" — Walter Gramatté
*Die grosse Angst (Selbstportrat, Kopf im Halbprofil nach rechts)*, 1918
drypoint with extensive additions in watercolor
sheet: 30 x 23.81 cm (11 13/16 x 9 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Christopher and Beverly With in memory of Karl and Gerda With

The National Gallery of Art has important holdings of prints and drawings by German expressionists Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, among others. The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy presents insights into the work of these inventive early 20th-century artists and their continuing impact a century later. The exhibition features recent acquisitions as well as works that have rarely, if ever, been on view, including gifts donated by celebrated Washington, DC, collectors Jacob and Ruth Cole Kainen. In addition to Heckel, Kirchner, and Nolde, the expressionists on view in more than 70 prints, drawings, illustrated books, and portfolios include key figures Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Egon Schiele, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as lesser-known artists such as Walter Grammatté.

Through their bold distortions, angular, simplified forms, and use of non-naturalistic colors, the German expressionists sought to convey the complex emotional and psychological responses to their changing world during the social, cultural, and political upheavals in the early decades of the 20th century. Following the recent World War I centenary, new reflections on the historical period 1900–1920 add depth to our understanding of these artists and their artistic heirs. Post-1950 and contemporary artists shown at the conclusion of the exhibition—Leonard Baskin, Nicole Eisenman, Orit Hofshi, Rashid Johnson, Matthias Mansen, and others—demonstrate the ways in which artists have carried forward the German expressionists’ rich legacy. The exhibition invites us to consider how the intensity of the human experience in transformational moments in history effectively captured in the work of the German expressionists strongly resonate with us and the cultural and political shifts taking place in our own world today.

The exhibition is curated by Shelley Langdale, curator and head of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art.

Divided into four thematic sections, The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy features works of art that focus on portraits and modern life; nature and spirituality; relationships and body language; and the “legacy” of German expressionism. This exhibition shares insights drawn from the increased understanding we now have of the complexities and impact of World War I, which concluded more than a century ago in 1918. It also introduces new approaches to broadening conventional art historical narratives. Artists working in Germany and Austria in the 1910s and 1920s challenged themselves to create expressive strategies for making art that reflected a heightened understanding and authentic representation of human experience amidst rapid social, cultural, and geopolitical transformations. The final room of the exhibition explores these ideas in the work of later artists whose similar approaches to mark making, materials, and sense of immediacy have been employed to respond to comparable circumstances and concerns—the most strikingly analogous circumstances being those facing contemporary artists working today.

The first room features penetrating portraits and self-portraits that focus on inner thoughts and emotional states of being rather than realistic accuracy of appearance. These works draw on concepts that were then emerging about personality traits and states of mind as developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, groundbreaking psychology scholars and philosophers in the early 20th century. The incisive diagonals, quavering lines, and gnarled fingers of the figure in Die Grosse Angst (The Great Anxiety), Walter Gramatté’s 1918 self-portrait, and the close cropping and gouged, carved, and scratched marks that define the facial features in the woodcut portrait Fanny Wocke (1916) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner demonstrate the ways artists used the characteristics of different media to impart emotional intensity. Prints and illustrated books by Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Otto Dix, Paul Gangolf, and George Grosz convey the emotional and political timbre of the time by showing the dynamics of modern life, increasingly congested cities and the accompanying sense of isolation and anonymity within them, dissatisfaction with the existing social order and bourgeois values, and the horrors of World War I.

The second gallery presents the religious subjects and landscapes that artists pursued in seeking refuge from the complexities and stress of daily life on one hand, while questioning faith and humankind’s destructive impact on the world on the other. Some of the highlights in this section include Lovis Corinth’s and Otto Mueller’s representations of the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff’s dazzling pink and green woodcut of rocky mountains, and Emil Nolde’s murky view of the harbor in Hamburg, Germany.

The German expressionists were fascinated by the ways gestures and movement could signify love, fear, sorrow, joy, and other aspects of people’s emotional state or personality. The different approaches these artists explored to depict the body, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships are featured in the third gallery. The tensions that can arise between husband and wife are represented by the green band that cuts horizontally across the composition in Walter Gramatté’s The Couple (Self-Portrait with Wife) of 1922. Love and security are felt in Käthe Kollwitz’s bronze relief In God’s Hands (1935/1936), which shows a small child protectively enveloped in the arms of an adult (represented only by a pair of hands). Counter to the traditional academic depictions of idealized nudes, these artists embraced a range of body types and discomforting positions, from the exaggeratedly puckered colorful surface of Egon Schiele’s Standing Nude with Patterned Robe (1917) to the awkwardly posed model kneeling on a rug in Erich Heckel’s Nude (c. 1913). Sources of inspiration include the art of Africa and the South Pacific Islands, which were inaccurately viewed through the bias of colonialism as “primitive” societies untainted by “civilization.” Elongated and exaggerated shapes, and the manner of articulation of certain features, as seen in the front-facing figure in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s lithograph Two Women (1914) and his rough-hewn wooden sculpture Head of a Woman (1913), and the dynamic movement in Emil Nolde’s color lithograph Dancer (Tänzerin) (1913) demonstrate the artists’ investigation of what they misinterpreted as “primal” aesthetic sensibilities that express vital forces of human experience.

The final room presents the legacy of German expressionism and how artists continue to draw upon its stylistic approaches to convey the heightened emotional and psychological experiences that accompany transformational moments in society. Among the highlights is Leonard Baskin’s The Hydrogen Man (1954), whose one-armed transparent figure, rendered in an intricate network of woodcut lines, warns of the ravages of modern nuclear warfare. Rashid Johnson’s grid of highly abstract boxes of “scribbled” faces fills the composition Untitled Anxious Red (2021), which was created during the COVID pandemic. It captures not only the elevated fear of contracting a deadly disease but also the challenge of negotiating the anxiety of being a Black man in America with tensions heightened by the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Among the National Gallery’s recent acquisitions are Nicole Eisenman’s Beer Garden (2012–2017), which combines self-portraiture with various “types” of caricatured figures that recall Max Beckmann’s prints in the first gallery, and Orit Hofshi’s Time… thou ceaseless lackey to eternity (2017), in which the artist, standing in a landscape ravaged by war and climate change, is surrounded by displaced people seeking refuge and a path to a better future.

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