Art History Lectures: German Art of the 20th Century
This October Cornelia Feye, former director of arts education at the Athenaeum, presents a series of four lectures on 20th-century German art.
The first official German Expressionist movement, Die Brücke (The Bridge), was founded by Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in 1905 Dresden. Their manifesto expressed their desire to overcome artifice and arrive at a true and authentic form of expression, modeled after German medieval traditions. In 1911 Munich, Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) was founded by Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Gabriele Münter, Lyonel Feininger, Albert Bloch, and others. In their work and publications these artists attempted to demonstrate that the roots of modern art can be traced to Non-Western sources.