In the new publication German Expressionism: Paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, Min Jung Kim, writes that the museum’s outstanding holdings of German Expressionist Art goes back to the St. Louis collector Morton D. May, who bought his first painting by Max Beckmann in 1948, two weeks after having seen the first major American exhibition of Max Beckmann’s works at the Saint Louis Art Museum, curated by its visionary director Perry T. Rathbone.
Melissa Venator is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Modern Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM). She wrote the book German Expressionism: Paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum, which features 48 of the over 700 Expressionist artworks owned by the museum, one of the largest collections of German Expressionism in the United States. The 48 works were made by twenty-five artists, mostly members of the two groundbreaking Expressionist artist associations Bridge (Brücke), founded in Dresden in 1905, and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), founded in Munich in 1911.
Melissa Venator: German Expressionism: Paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum. With contribuations by S. Kelly, M. Moog, L. Murphy. Hirmer, 304 pages, 199 color illustrations, 25.4 x 30 cm, 10 x 12 inches, hardcover. ISBN: 978-3-7774-4256-3. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the English book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
In the present book, Min Jung Kim underlines that, following the decades after the 1948 exhibition, Morton D. May purchased hundreds of works of modern German art, including most of the paintings in the catalogue presented here. When he died in 1983, he left his vast collection to the Museum, giving it the world’s largest collection of paintings (40) by Max Beckmann as well as the world’s largest collection of Beckmann prints and transforming its holdings of European, African, ancient American and Oceanic art. His gifts inspired the Saint Louis Art Museum to expand its collection of German art into the present with acquisitions of major works by Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, among others, and to mount landmark exhibitions.
Regarding the collector Morton D. May, Melissa Venator notes that the naval officer, after returning home to St. Louis after World War II, he became an executive in his family’s department store empire. At the same time, he developed a deep passion for art. In a trip to New York City in 1951, he noticed a collection of Expressionist paintings and watercolors in the New Art Circle J. B. Neumann gallery that he had seen there years before. He wondered why they had gone unsold and purchased the works, which were cheap at the time (the $4,000 invoice for a large selection of artworks has been reproduced on page 18 of the present publication).
The anti-German sentiment in the United States was still strong, although one has to add that most Expressionist artists had been victims of a Nazi purge, their art could no longer be exposed, had been seized, banned from German public museums and was partly sold abroad in the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, this Nazi crusade included the infamous 1937 “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) exhibition and campaign, which not only targeted the Expressionists, but also Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and many other modernist artists. In his younger years, with little success, Adolf Hitler himself had worked as a professional artist who had been rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien).
Back to the St. Louis collector Morton D. May. In his own words, in the post-war period, he began his (successful) “one-man crusade to see that German expressionism was given its rightful position in modern art”.
As mentioned above, the Saint Louis Art Museum’s global collection contains over 700 Expressionist artworks. Most of the major works were donations by Morton D. May. The 48 made by 25 artists chosen by Melissa Venator featured in her book offer a great panorama of German Expressionism. She included all famous artists as well as some lesser known, partly overlooked figures.
In the Preface to the book, Simon Kelly, Curator and Head of Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, situates the Expressionists within a larger avant-garde tradition, dating back to the early 19th century, which aligned artistic innovation with political radicalism. He cites the Manifesto of the Brücke Artists’ Group from 1906: With faith in evolution, in a new generation of creators and appreciators, we call together all youth. And as youths, who embody the future, we want to free our lives and limbs from the long-established older powers.
The idealism and utopianism of the Expressionists only dissipated during the First World War. In the Introduction, Melissa Venator writes that “Expressionism” was first used by art critics in 1911 to describe a new type of art that had just begun to appear in exhibitions and galleries across Germany (Paul Ferdinand Schmidt: “Über die Expressionisten”, Die Rheinlande 21, no. 12, December 1911).
Melissa Venator underlines that, from the start, there was little consensus on the movement’s origins or aims, much less its leading figures. Many artists labeled as Expressionist in the press rejected the designation, and those who accepted it offered conflicting accounts. In contrast, the term was popular with the art-viewing public, who understood it as a repudiation of Impressionism. The movement took root in a generation of artists born between 1870 and 1890 who encountered Post-Impressionism and late Symbolism at formative stages in their artistic developments. Their heroes were Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch and Ferdinand Hodler.
Melissa Venator writes that, in comparison with previous styles, the subjects of the Expressionists became more abstracted from nature; colors, more intense and unnatural; and forms, flatter with heavy outlines. She underlines that what caused critics in Germany to really take notice was how quickly this new art appeared. Almost overnight every artist under 30 had abandoned Impressionism, Naturalism and Symbolism, and in their place was art that shocked and outraged. At the time, some critics wrote of the emergence of a new and uniquely German movement, although The Blue Rider group was quite international because it included the the Russians Vasily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky as well as the American-born Lyonel Feininger and Albert Bloch, as Simon Kelly rightly remarked.
Melissa Venator writes that Expressionism began in the years after 1900 with artists who worked in almost total anonymity, alone and in small groups, to develop a new type of art. The earliest of these were Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died before the movement took off, and Emil Nolde.
Expressionism gained acceptance in the years of the Weimar Republic. Melissa Venator writes that this signaled the beginning of the end of Expressionism as the avant-garde of modern art in Germany. A younger generation of artists, including Otto Dix and George Grosz, engaged with Expressionism during and immediately after the war, now rejected it in favor of Dada. Realism, in the form of New Objectivity, became the dominan tGerman art in the mid-1920s, and artists like Walter Gramatté created works that synthesized Expressionism, New Objectivity and Surrealism. Subsequently, under the Nazi regime (1933–45), Expressionism and its artists became targets in a crusade against modernism in all its forms.
Regarding the collector Morton D. May, Melissa Venator notes that he bought Max Beckmann for depth, acquiring paintings from all of his periods and in a range of subjects. In contrast, he collected Expressionist paintings for breadth, acquiring representative paintings by as many artists as possible. He favored the artists of the Brücke over those of the Blue Rider. He eventually expanded beyond Expressionism with paintings by Willi Baumeister, Max Ernst, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwitters and Fritz Winter, among others. What began with Expressionism transformed into a collection of German painting of the twentieth century.
This and much more, notably detailed information about twenty-five Expressionists and some of their masterpieces, can be found in Melissa Venator: German Expressionism: Paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum. With contribuations by S. Kelly, M. Moog, L. Murphy. Hirmer, 304 pages, 199 color illustrations, 25.4 x 30 cm, 10 x 12 inches, hardcover. ISBN: 978-3-7774-4256-3. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the English book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
The twenty-five artists featured in the SLAM book: Albert Bloch, Heinrich Campendonk, Lovis Corinth, Otto Dix, Josef Eberz, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gramatté, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer, Alexei Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinksy, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Mueller, Gabriele Münter, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Georg Tappert.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review of German Expressionism: Paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum have not been put between quotation marks.
Book review added on October 2, 2024 at 10:23 German time.
