Going wild

In November 1905, in the Galerie Ernst Arnold, four young architecture students from the Dresden Technical School had their first encounter with Vincent van Gogh. Only six months earlier, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl had formed an avant-garde artists’ group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), to represent ‘all who express directly and truthfully what urges them to create’. At the sight of 54 paintings by van Gogh, remembered a teacher, they ‘went wild’.

The extraordinary impact of one man’s singular vision on the birth of modern art in Germany and Austria is the subject of an ambitious new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism unites 30 paintings and drawings by van Gogh with 60 works by Expressionist painters. Among those represented are the founder members of Die Brücke, later joined by Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde; the associates of Der Blaue Reiter, formed in Munich in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter and later attracting August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee; and various non-affiliated Viennese Expressionists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl, plus Lovis Corinth and Otto Dix. In all, a grand total of 20 painters stylistically stamped with the DNA of the artist hailed by Pechstein as ‘the father of us all’.

How did a Dutchman who had died in obscurity in France less than 20 years earlier achieve such an ascendancy over German and Austrian art? For a start, it was a huge advantage not being French. For half a century the German art establishment had been fighting a losing battle against French influence: Impressionism was fine for France, but what the Germans needed was a national art expressive of the ‘German soul’.