Expressionism, the Bauhaus and Weimar
From the screaming colours of Die Brücke and the blue horses of Der Blaue Reiter to the tubular steel furniture of the Bauhaus – within a quarter of a century Germany became the centre of modern art.
In 1905 four architecture students in Dresden formed the artists’ group Die Brücke, the Bridge. They painted nudes in nature and the streets of the city in strong, unmixed colours and angular forms. In Munich Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter came together in Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, seeking a spiritual art of colour and form. In Vienna Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka painted people in the grip of anxiety and desire. It was called Expressionism, an art of expression.
The First World War shattered a great deal. Franz Marc and August Macke were killed, and many others came home wounded in body and mind. In Berlin the Dadaists responded with collage, photomontage and scorn for the values of the war and the bourgeoisie. During the 1920s Otto Dix and George Grosz painted a cold, revealing picture of war cripples, profiteers and prostitutes. The new style took the name Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, after an exhibition in Mannheim in 1925. Art became sharper, colder and more political.
In 1919 the architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, a school where art, craft and industry were to be united. Its teachers included Paul Klee and Kandinsky. From 1925 the school was housed in Dessau in a building of glass and concrete. There tubular steel furniture, lamps and textiles were created that became models for modern design all over the world. When the Nazis seized power in 1933 the Bauhaus was closed, and the heyday of German modernism came to a brutal end.