Art History 207

Expressionism consists of artworks that focus on the real expression. Not the realistic display but the emotional representation of the artists motive.

Artist’s like Erich Heckel had the idea of freeing himself from the tradition and free from most of the art movements. Art should be original and should break from tradition, also this laid the bases of the avant garde. To describe new varieties of movements artists conceived that they should try to break from the tradition to create something new. In the norm to be extraordinary and inventive the artists within this movement set a subconscious statement to communicate with the viewer who glances at each work from this movement. Erich Heckel was an artist from this movement who created works that set a notion of viewing the unseen and have a hidden conversation.

This painting of the Landscape near Dresden, is prominent as Erich Heckel being from the group of artist that founded the group “Brucke” which means “bridge”. This would be special amongst his many landscape paintings because of its very name. With Expressionist emotions of action in mind is evident within this painting. The vigorous brush strokes with the red paint in the foreground and blue in the background add to the shifts within the planes of the painting. It also has predominant use of three colors we can see the clear use of the primary colors with vibrancy within every tint and shade. There is human figures that show the scale of human figure in comparison with the landscape. There is complete disregard towards making the painting appealing or enduring. There is no notion of calmness that comes about this painting. The overall painting has no structure shown in its naturalistic forms but rather every subject in the painting take shape and are differentiated amongst one another because of the interchanging colors. There is some sense of perspective with the vanishing point leading the eye to the distant green path. The scenario of the artists within this movement was to step out of the norm, step out of the general representation of the way people and especially artists perceived the world around them. Such landscape representation was the complete contrast to the stylization in painterly style set by the Fauves and Impressionists.