THEN AND NOW COMPARISONS

Like a lot of people I'm a fan of British painter John Constable who painted the Flatford Mill (above) somewhere around 1820. His color choices remind me of El Greco's palette...very grey and gritty, almost expressionist. 

He also seems to have been influenced by the Dutch landscape painters of Rembrandt's time. You see that instantly if you compare the painting with the recent color photo of the same mill below.

If this (above) is what Constable really saw then he's added a lot to what was actually there. 

Constable's painting gives a Dutch emphasis to the sky and to the activities of man. I'm guessing that the Dutch focus on the sky was religiously motivated and their nod to the ingenuity of man was to portray humans as contributing in a small way to the creation described in Genesis.

 Here's (above) another Constable from the same period. He's more sentimental here and less expressionist. Once again nature is portrayed as being improved by the presence of man.

 Here's (above) a close shot photo of the same area as it exists today. Unlike Constable's picture, the trees and shrubs reflect the modern taste for nature untouched by man. The landscape is still cultivated here but the cultivation is disguised. I guess my tastes are modern because I like the newer look. I still like Constable, though.

I don't want to confine my comparisons to paintings, so here's (above) a comparison of two photos. The first shows a village intersection taken in 1910 or 20. I like the way the winding road invites the viewer to take a stroll up the hill.

Here's the same intersection, a hundred years later. The earlier view is better, but the hill is still somewhat inviting and the tree is a nice addition. I do wish, though, that the view of the house on the hill had been preserved. Also, the structures on the right seem to have been built without sensitivity to the area they have to fit into.

This (above) is a postcard showing a bridge in Derbyshire, I'm not sure about the date. I'll guess the 1910s. The trees on the nearby hill are sparse but still picturesque.

 Here's (above) the same bridge a hundred years later. A near forest has grown up. IMO, the lush vegetation is a bit less beautiful than the sparse version, but I'm so happy to see new growth that I support the later version nevertheless.

How about one more? What do you think of this street (above)? I'm guessing the picture was snapped between 1900 and 1920. The houses on the left make a nice contrast to the shops on the right. I like the way the street ends at a perpendicular row of houses.

Here (above, a hundred years later) the houses on the right have been preserved...well, sort of...but the structures on the left have been badly altered and the street seems awkwardly wider than before.

I don't think parked cars hurt the appearance of a street but I miss the molding along the top of the windows of the foreground shop, and the second floor balcony supports (corbels).

EXPESSIONIST SCULPTURE (EXPANDED)

One of the best war memorials I've ever seen is a German Expressionist sculpture (above) by Ernst Barlach. It was executed in clay in 1927 to commemorate the dead of WWI, but the Nazis didn't like it and WWII intervened with the result that it wasn't cast in bronze until 1952. It's a pity that it's not better known. The horror of war may never have been depicted as accurately.

Thinking about Barlach made me curious to know more about the Expressionist sculptors.

So far as I know the first Expressionist sculptor was Rodin, a Frenchman. For Rodin nature was a starting point but it always had to be modified by human bias. You could argue that sculpture was always like that but Rodin added exploration and risk and performance. Even humor.

Rodin worked in clay, marble and bronze but lots of later German sculptors preferred wood. Maybe that's because their African influences worked in that medium. Maybe it's because wood was cheap and the artists were poor. One sculptor (Kirchner, above) said he liked wood because the process of carving and creation were visible on the finished piece for all to see. Conventional sculpture was worked in clay and handed off to others

for casting. Only in wood could you say that the final product was produced by a single mind.

Incidentally, I like the way Kirchner frequently photographed his sculptures (above) against painted patterns. 

For all its beauty there's something wild and almost unhinged about early German Expressionism, as if the artists who did it were crazy or under a lot of stress. It was an odd discipline because in its early stage it seemed incapable of expressing happiness or sentimentality.

I don't know of any other medium that deliberately excluded a whole range of human emotion. Even so, there are ideas and insights it would be difficult to express if that kind of art didn't exist.

In order to illustrate this point I had to use a painting rather than sculpture. That's because sculpture rarely succeeded in isolating the negative emotions as well as painting. The same might be said of early Expressionist architecture. The first examples were somber and horrific (above).

Later the medium evolved into something that could convey humor and fun.

EMIL NOLDE'S PAINTINGS

I've blogged before about the mysterious and aggressive quality of color, especially when it's relatively unrestrained as it is in the Nolde picture above. Lots of people wouldn't agree with that. For them color is sentimental and comforting. I envy them. My own innocence about color has been shattered by the discoveries of a painter named Emil Nolde (1867 - 1956) who's the subject of this post.

Nolde couldn't draw people. Maybe that's a good thing because his difficulties with line may have been what led him to concentrate entirely on color.

Nolde's early paintings (above) were influenced by Van Gogh. 

Later he shows the influence of Gauguin and the Nabis.

He was even influenced by Matisse. Here (above) he takes what I call the the bold, aggressive quality of color and successfully harnesses it to decoration as Matisse did. The public liked what he was doing and he might have profitably painted this way for years to come, but around this time he seems to have become interested in color for its own sake. He became obsessed with the idea that color had a life of its own which was suffocated by line.

 Nolde wasn't the only artist to dream of liberating color. Fauves like Vlaminck and Derain (that's a Derain, above) attempted it but they confined color with line and that had the effect of taming it down.

Kandinsky (above) did the same. Even in his abstract pictures he was usually afraid to remove the lines.

Bonnard got rid of the lines but still didn't liberate the color. He just confined it a different way, in this case by muting it with white. It's as if all the painters I've mentioned wanted to open the cage door to give color its freedom, but once it was on the outside they insisted on walking it on a tight leash.

Not so Nolde. He opened the door and let the tiger escape. He allowed his color, indescribably brutal and mindful of nothing but its own will to live, to leap out and grab the viewer by the jugular.

Look at this landscape (above). The liberated red comes off as a predatory beast roaming the landscape and looking for victims. I don't know about you, but I hear the strident parts of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" when I look at it.

 Nolde painted almost exclusively in watercolor during the WWII years, and therein lies a story.

According to Wikipedia, Nolde became a passionate Nazi while he was still living in Denmark in the 20s. His work became very well known and even caught the attention of Goebbels who was a fan of Expressionism and who arranged for Nolde to work on an infamous anti-semitic film. It must have seemed to Nolde that he had it made, but fate had something else in store for him.

It turns out that Hitler loathed Expressionism and he gave Nolde pride of place in his Degenerate Art show. Goebbels, being the toady that he was, not only dropped Nolde like a hot potato but claimed to have discovered that the artist had a Jewish ancestor. Nolde was given a rifle and shipped off to the army where he painted watercolors in secret. He was forbidden to work in oils.

So Nolde was not what you'd call a nice guy, and his pictures have a very disturbing, neurotic quality to them. Even so, you have to credit the man with liberating color in a way that nobody else had. It's impossible to imagine DeKooning or Hoffman or many of the Abstract Expressionists or even Mary Blair without reference to Nolde. What can I say? Nature distributes its gifts in ways not understandable by man.