Expressive
landscapes can probably best be described as a personal vision of the subject -
an emotional or imaginative view of the world around us. This type of expressive painting began in the
last years of the 19th century with artists such as Van Gogh and
Cezanne but really came into its own in the first half of the 20th
century. So many art movements were
happening at this time, along with massive social change and two world wars,
all of which inspired change to this most traditional of genres.
The Fauves (Wild Beasts) were so named
after an exhibition in Paris in 1905, where their work was described as
primitive because of its “… strident colours, rough handling and distorted,
anti-naturalistic drawing”.
Andre Derain
and Henri Matisse are the most famous of the group (two works of each are shown
below). Matisse originally expanded on
pointillism – using dashes of paint separated by areas of white canvas, rather
than Seurat’s small dots (as in Luxe, Calme and Volupte, 1904/5 )
- before moving towards his most famous style – large blocks of bright, primary
colour with flattened perspective and stylised forms.
Derain
painting a number of paintings in London, most of the views from the River
Thames itself. According to the Tate “He
had been sent to London by his dealer, Vollard. The idea was to update, in
Fauve style, the popular Thames views painted by Claude Monet a few years
earlier. Strongly-coloured and freely-handled, this painting (referring to the
Pool of London) is characteristic of Fauvism in creating vivid effects through
bold contrasts of colour”.
Although this
movement was short lived, the Fauves’ impact was high: “By freeing colour from
its traditional descriptive role in representation, the Fauves led the way to
its use as an expressive end in itself”
Vienna
Secession / Symbolist: Gustav Klimt.
While Klimt was more known for his large paintings of women with highly
decorative clothing covered in abstract motifs and gold (both leaf and dust), he
also painted a number of landscapes, many showing his fascination with pattern
and detail.
Gustav
Klimt, the Swamp 1900 - In this
painting of a swampy pond, you can see his attention to detail and pattern in
the water. Although I was unable to zoom
this image, you can see the multitude of colours used and the complex
patterning used to describe the shadows, water plants and algae floating on the
water.
Kammer Castle on Lake Attersee II,
1909 - In this
image, Klimt’s obsession with pattern is evident. The only solid colour is the white and cream
paint on the walls of the building.
Everything else – the roofs, grass and trees is comprised of multiple
colours applied in small strokes, patches and dots. This technique makes it difficult for the
viewer to take in the image as a whole, you have to move round the painting,
concentrating on each individual element in order for your brain to process it
before moving on.
The First
World War, more than others, appears to have been described to us both by its
poets and artists. Even though photography
and early film had been invented (and we do have these images), it is through
words and paint that we understand the true horror of this war, with its
immense loss of life fought in the trenches of France and Belgium. Even now, certain images spring to mind
immediately – barbed wire, trenches, “going over the top”, gas attacks, the
poppies blooming in disturbed ground.
The war
artists Paul Nash and Christopher Nevinson embodied the style of the time in
their paintings by using cubist and futurist imagery to bring home the horror
of war.
Nash’s
painting “The Menin Road” typifies the destruction of modern
warfare. The title itself says it all –
there is no road there, everything has been destroyed. The green fields and trees are gone to be
replaced by sombre, dark and dull colours.
The soft edges of plants displaced by the hard edges of war. All this is seen in the picture below – all
the edges are hard and angular. In the middle are two small figures, trying to
find their way round all the shell holes and destruction.
From the
Imperial War Museum website:
“Nash
received the commission for this work, which was originally to have been called
'A Flanders Battlefield', from the Ministry of Information in April 1918. It
was to feature in a Hall of Remembrance devoted to ‘fighting subjects, home
subjects and the war at sea and in the air’. The centre of the scheme was to be
a coherent series of paintings based on the dimensions of Uccello’s ‘Battle of
San Romano’ in the National Gallery (72 x 125 inches), this size being
considered suitable for a commemorative battle painting. While the commissions
included some of the most avant-garde British artists of the time, the British
War Memorials Committee advisors saw the scheme as firmly within the tradition
of European art commissioning, looking to models from the Renaissance. It was
intended that both the art and the setting would celebrate national ideals of
heroism and sacrifice. However, the Hall of Remembrance was never built and the
work was given to the Imperial War Museum. Nash worked on the painting from
June 1918 to February 1919. Nash suggested the following inscription for the
painting. 'The picture shows a tract of country near Gheluvelt village in the
sinister district of 'Tower Hamlets', perhaps the most dreaded and disastrous
locality of any area in any of the theatres of War.' Two soldiers try to follow the line of a road
that has been mutilated, almost beyond recognition. In fact, the whole
landscape has been re-arranged, with the giant concrete blocks epitomising this
harsh new order: the bursts of sunlight have become gun barrels; the
reflections of trees, steel structures.”
Nevinson’s
work here concentrates more on the human scale of war – three soldiers picking
their way through tangled barbed wire defences.
The same devices have been used as in Nash’s work – the hard angles and
diagonals, the sombre colours and the traditional landscape supplanted by a
strange, lunar-like cratered surface.
Salvador
Dali is probably the best known Surrealist – his works are hyper-realistic in
their painting style but that is the only realism that could be applied to
Dali. He was motivated by the works on
psychoanalysis by Freud and used his art to explore his imagination. Freud published a work “The Interpretation of
Dreams” in 1900 and believed that unconscious thoughts and dream could be
analysed and brought into consciousness, thus exploring unfulfilled or
repressed wishes and desires. His
painting style was very traditional, building up layers of oil using fine
brushes to achieve a high level of detail, often applying his dream-like images
on top of actual or imagined landscapes to achieve a great sense to scale and
depth, often in fairly small paintings.
One of
Dali’s great paintings is “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of
Civil War” (1936) which was completed 6 months before Spain did fall into civil
war. It depicts a huge, very distorted
body, trying to pull itself apart, set in an apocalyptic, desert like
landscape, with a handful of beans on the ground.
Max Ernst was involved with the Dada
movement before moving to Paris and becoming a key figure in the Surrealist
movement. Ernst developed a number of
unusual painting techniques frequently involving the discovery of images within
patterned surfaces. This interest can be
seen in the painting above – the paint has a very unusual texture, as if it has
been peeled or scraped off to reveal underlayers.
Renee
Magritte’s surrealism is more “ordinary” than many other artists, the dreamlike
fantasy worlds are replaced by more ordinary, mundane subjects – but always
with a twist. The painting The Empire of
Lights at first appears a fairly normal image until you look closer: the bright
blue sky with clouds tells us it is daytime, but the dark, silhouette of the
buildings seems to tell us it is dusk.
Moving down the painting is a streetlight, the glow showing us the
detail of the building and telling us it is dark.
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