To supplement my reading about the Modernists I found it interesting the visit the German Expressionist collection at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. The collection was founded in 1944 and documents the journey from Impressionism through to Expressionism and the first world war. The exhibition aims to provide fresh insight into the work and explores the legacy of Expressionism in the present day by commissioning new works that respond to the collection.
Red Woman, Franz Marc, 1912
The Blue Rider Almanac, Edited by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, Second Edition, 1914, Published by R Piper & Co. Verlag, Munich
The exhibition covers key groups, such as the Brucke artists and Der Blaue Reiter. It includes some Marc and Kandinsky works among others, and there is a copy of The Blue Rider Almanac on display.
The exhibition also discusses the First World War and its influence on art. There are works addressing the horror of conflict as artists struggled to make sense of the world around them and retreated into abstraction.
Apocalyptic Vision, Ludwig Meidner, 1912
The March into the Unknown, Max Slevogt, 1917
Red Tulips, Christian Rohifs, 1923
Village, Lyonel Feininger, 1920
Street under a Bridge, Lyonel Feininger, 1917
One work that stood out to me was Self Portrait with Cat painted by Lotte Laserstein. Laserstein was a Berlin artist and one of the first female students to study at the Berlin Academy. She depicted women of the 1930s who who were motivated and independent like herself. In 1934, nazi laws banned her from exhibiting and she was forced to leave Germany for Sweden. I thought that the naturalism of the pose and gaze felt very contemporary and made me draw comparisons with present day and people whose lives are still being disrupted by war.
Self Portrait with Cat, Lotte Laserstein, 1928
Expressionism: The Total Artwork gallery is part of the permanent collection at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. The museum hosts regular tours of the collection https://www.leicestermuseums.org/German-Expressionsim-Tours