Outrageously Expressive! The attitudes towards life of Kirchner, Kollwitz, and others

Street fights, exuberant dance evenings, voyeuristic bathing scenes, the self—Expressionism in the 1910s and 1920s was the “expression” of a newly awakened attitude toward life. Artists no longer saw themselves represented in traditional academic art. Their claim: honest, immediate art born of feeling and individual experience. The energy of this generation of artists was unleashed in dynamic, reduced, raw, often deformed pictorial compositions. The mpk is showing around 80 works from its extensive graphic arts collection, as well as several items on loan from private collections. These include important artists from the “Die Brücke” group, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Max Pechstein, and from the “Der Blaue Reiter” group, such as Franz Marc, August Macke, and Alexej von Jawlensky.

In a thematic extension, Dr. Sören Fischer, head of the graphic arts collection at the mpk, explores the exhibition and acquisition policy under its first post-war director, Carl Maria Kiesel. Particular attention is paid to the question of the extent to which Kiesel and his team deliberately exhibited and purchased works by Expressionist artists who had been ostracized and persecuted under the Nazi dictatorship after 1947 in order to reestablish and rehabilitate them in the consciousness of the German public and in the context of the new democratization of society.

Curated by Dr. Sören Fischer and Denise Kamm, M.A.

The special exhibition includes texts in German and English.