French expressionism began in 1905. Several French artists were greatly impacted when a series of exhibitions of the works of Van Gogh, and Cezanne ran from 1901 to 1906. This was the first time that the works of these artists had been widely available for public viewing. In 1905, a group of young artists held an exhibit

which so shocked the conservative critic Louis Vauxcelles that he called them “Fauves,” or “wild beasts.” Rather than take umbrage at this title, the artists embraced it with pride. The Fauves created a new style “ full of the violent color of Van Gogh and the bold distortions of Gauguin, which they manipulated freely for pictorial and e

The dreaminess of Kandinsky’s art was similar in some ways to that of another member of Der Blaue Reiter, Franz Marc.

Der Blaue Reiter dissolved when World War I began. The group continued to have influence at the Bauhaus school, where Kandinsky and Klee were teachers in later years. Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar. It was intended to be a fusion of an art academy and an arts and crafts school. Bauhaus based its ideas on the principles of the English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. This movement believed that the purpose of art was to meet the needs of society and that there was no difference between fine arts and practical crafts. It also advanced the idea that modern art and architecture should respond to the needs and the influence of industry. According to Bauhaus good design must be aesthetically pleasing and have sound engineering. After the school was closed in 1933 by the Nazis, many of the faculty immigrated to the United States, where the ideas taught by the Bauhaus school began to dominate art and architecture for decades.

Kandinsky was one of the leaders of the group. He began to withdraw from realistic representations around 1910 and eventually abandoned them. He used rainbow colors and didn’t focus on objects. His brushwork was similar to that of the Fauves in its freedom and its dynamic nature. While not geometrically abstract (at least not until many years later), Kandinsky’s art depicted freely invented landscapes and had a dreamlike quality. He eliminated all resemblance to the physical world in an effort to charge his paintings with a feeling of spirituality. He was similar to Rouault in his attempt to use his art for spiritual renewal, but he wasn’t specific to one religion. Kandinsky sums up his art himself:

While Kandinsky dealt with dreamlike landscapes, Marc dealt with the unconscious mind of animals in nature. History of Art describes Marc’s paintings as representative of “ humanity’s desire to return to a state of harmony with the universe” (Janson 777).

Matisse was the leader of the Fauves and the oldest member. He sought to express emotion, but not through facial expressions. Instead he used the whole arrangement of figures, object

Some topics in this essay:
Die Brucke, Kandinsky’s Kandinsky, Rouault Matisse, Jackson Pollock, History Art, According Bauhaus, Brucke Bridge, Georges Rouault, Arts Crafts, Edvard Munch, die brucke, der blaue, blaue reiter, der blaue reiter, van gogh, express emotion, world war, van gogh cezanne, history art, expressionists seen, janson 771, gogh cezanne, cezanne edvard munch,