AWCH The world out of joint

The shock of the new – that famous phrase used to describe modern art – is difficult to sustain. But the vibrant German Expressionists, with their splintered geometries, their distortions and compressions, their black silences and uneasy colours – all green streets and clocks with hands about to converge on the 12 – speak so eloquently of trouble to come that even at close to a century’s distance, they have the power to surprise.

Two exhibitions, one in New York and another that came from Washington, D.C., to London, show how seriously early 20th century German artists tried to explore the role of man in a perplexing, shifting society. In 1905, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, two architecture students from Dresden, helped found a group called Die Brücke (the bridge), whose members saw art as a path taking man to a higher plane. Inspired by Nietzsche, they believed art could renew and reshape bourgeois society.

The Brücke artists were driven by a belief that modern, industrial and urban life had debased individual creativity. They saw nature, and the art of what were then called primitive societies, as regenerating forces, and they spent their summers bathing in the nude and painting. To some, their noisy manifestos, elaborate staged performances and not infrequent sexual intrigues make them a parody of bohemian artists. But, in addition to a youthful idealism, the best Brücke artists – Kirchner, Heckel, Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde in particular – also shared a raw talent and a genuine belief that there was more to art than mere aesthetic experience.

The Expressionists’ artistic godfathers were Albrecht Dürer, whose woodcuts inspired many of their more innovative experiments, and Edvard Munch, then already well-established in Germany and famous for his paintings of psychological intensity. In the year they launched Die Brücke, the first show of Van Gogh’s works came to Dresden, opening their eyes to the expressive possibilities of colour.

Much of the best work produced in Germany at the time was done in a few short years. World War I crushed the intensity and idealism of Die Brücke; fear, imprisonment and exile destroyed many artists afterwards.

Jill Lloyd, an independent scholar of German modern art and curator of an exhibition of Kirchner’s work as well as organiser of the Christian Schad exhibition that was shown at the Neue Galerie in New York says: “We’ve gone past the generation of the war and there’s less aggression toward all things German.” After the Second World War, the British Museum famously refused a gift of German Expressionist graphic works. It is impossible to imagine this happening today. “These artists witnessed themselves becoming members of a lost society, whose progressive ideals were destroyed. The human content of their work is very contemporary,” Ms Lloyd says. For a brief moment, they sought to take on the world. At last the world is looking.

See the Bucerius Kunst Forum website (www.buceriuskunstforum.de) for information on a Brücke exhibition there from October 17, 2004 - January 23, 2005.