Expressionism Reassessed

"Expressionism reassesed focuses on the multi-disciplinary development of Expressionism, setting it in a cultural, political, and historical context. The international team of specialists cover painting, music, theatre, sculpture, film opera, architecture, and dance." -- Back cover.

A beautifully illustrated examination of the women artists whose inspired search for artistic integrity and equality influenced Expressionist avant-garde culture Women Artists in Expressionism explores how women negotiated the competitive world of modern art during the late Wilhelmine and early Weimar periods in Germany. Their stories challenge predominantly male-oriented narratives of Expressionism and shed light on the divergent artistic responses of women to the dramatic events of the early twentieth century. Shulamith Behr shows how the posthumous critical reception of Paula Modersohn-Becker cast her as a prime agent of the feminization of the movement, and how Käthe Kollwitz used printmaking as a vehicle for technical innovation and sociopolitical commentary. She looks at the dynamic relationship between Marianne Werefkin and Gabriele Münter, whose different paths in life led them to the Blaue Reiter, a group of Expressionist artists that included Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Behr examines Nell Walden’s role as an influential art dealer, collector, and artist, who promoted women Expressionists during the First World War, and discusses how Dutch artist Jacoba van Heemskerck’s spiritual abstraction earned her the status of an honorary German Expressionist. She demonstrates how figures such as Rosa Schapire and Johanna Ey contributed to the development of the movement as spectators, critics, and collectors of male avant-gardism. Richly illustrated, Women Artists in Expressionism is a women-centered history that reveals the importance of emancipative ideals to the shaping of modernity and the avant-garde.

In the second decade of the twentieth century the cultural life of Germany was transformed by the emergence of Expressionism, a series of vigorous, youthful artistic movements which were to exert a lasting influence on modern culture. In the same decade a young Swiss pastor called Karl Barth began a theological revolution, laying the foundations for probably the most influential body of Christian theology in the modern age. Some relationship between these two revolutions has long been assumed by scholars; yet it has never been examined in detail. The first part of this study addresses this omission, offering the most detailed analysis to date of the important relationship between Barth and Expressionism. The second part of the book takes a broader look at both Barth's theology and Expressionist culture, considering the relevance of the Enlightenment as a context for both. The key to this is a detailed discussion of Barth's own analysis of the Enlightenment in his neglected book Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Barth's view is also compared with Alasdair MacIntyre's treatment of the Enlightenment in After Virtue. The examination of these two contexts, German Expressionism and the Enlightenment, yields valuable insights into Barth's entire theological project.

This work provides an introduction to the visual arts in Germany from the early years of German unification to World War II. The study is an analysis of painting, sculpture, graphic art, design, film and photography in relation to a wider set of cultural and social issues that were specific to German modernism. It concentrates on the ways in which the production and reception of art interacted with and was affected by responses to unification, conflict between left and right political factions, gender concerns, contemporary philosophical and religious ideas, the growth of cities, and the increasing important of mass culture.

This book includes some 200 complete entries from the award-winning Dictionary of Women Artists, as well as a selection of introductory essays from the main volume.

"The papers... were delivered at a conference, Aesthetics and Politics in Modern German Culture, which was held in honour of Professor Rhys W. Williams ... the conference took place, from 31 August to 2 September 2008, at the University of Wales Conference Centre, Gregynog Hall" --Foreword.

Berlin, city of Bertolt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich, cabaret and German Expressionism, a city identified with a female sexuality - at first alluring but then dangerous. In this fascinating study, Dorothy Rowe turns our attention to Berlin as a sexual landscape. She investigates the processes by which women and femininity played a prominent role in depictions of the city at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. She explores how in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, increasing anxieties about the liberation of women and the supposed increase of female prostitution contributed to the demonization of the city not as a focus of desire and pleasure but rather as one of alienation and anxiety.

This lively, opinionated, and playful look at the movies is a must-read for film buffs, and for anyone interested in gender, sexuality, and popular culture. One thing's for sure. After reading Flaming Classics you'll know you're definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Jews on trial concentrates on Inquisitorial activity during the period which historians have argued was the most active in the Inquisition's history: the first forty years of the tribunal in Modena, from 1598 to 1638, the year of the Jews' enclosure in the ghetto.Scholars have in the past tended to group trials of Jews and conversos in Italy together. This book emphasises the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure, as well as the evidence examined, and argues that this was especially true in Modena where the secular authority did not have the power during the period in question to reject, or even significantly monitor, Inquisitorial trial procedure. It draws upon the detailed testimony to be found in trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community.This book will appeal to scholars of inquisitorial studies, social and cultural interaction in early modern Europe, Jewish Italian social history and anti-Semitism.

This new concise history of modern painting offers an indispensable reference to the complexities and characteristics of this medium, which now exists alongside many other contemporary practices that embrace radically expanded ideas about art. While acknowledging the legacy of Herbert Read’s classic 1959 study A Concise History of Modern Painting in the World of Art series, academic and artist Simon Morley places the foundation of modern art much earlier than Read, at the emergence of Romanticism and the dawn of the industrial age. Structured loosely chronologically by period, the focus is as much on individual artists as movements, with works discussed within a broader context—stylistic, historical, geographic, and gender and ethnic frames—themes which recur throughout the chapters. Generously illustrated, the global and diverse range of artists featured include William Blake, Édouard Manet, Hilma af Klint, Kazimir Malevich, Willem de Kooning, Amrita Sher-Gil, Faith Ringgold, and Kehinde Wiley. This guide also includes an appendix in the form of questions the reader might like to ask about the artists and ideas discussed—in order to reconsider the works from a contemporary perspective.