Surrealism, Expressionism and the Nabis were three distinct currents of modern European painting, from the decorative flat color of the Nabis through Expressionist emotion to the dream images of Surrealism. The Nabis worked in Paris from 1888 to 1900, Expressionism arose in Germany and Austria around 1905, and Surrealism was launched in Paris in 1924.
The Nabis were young painters, most of them students at the Académie Julian in Paris, who admired Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. In October 1888 Paul Sérusier painted a small wooded landscape at Pont-Aven under Gauguin’s guidance, built from patches of unmixed color; his friends called it The Talisman (1888, Musée d’Orsay). That year Auguste Cazalis gave the group its name, taken from the Hebrew word for prophets. Its members, among them Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Félix Vallotton, behaved like a half-serious secret society. Ranson’s studio served as their temple, and Bonnard, devoted to Japanese prints, was nicknamed the very Japanese Nabi.
In 1890 Maurice Denis, then nineteen, argued that before it shows a horse, a nude or a story, a picture is essentially a plane surface on which colors are arranged in a chosen order. Nabi paintings follow this idea, with flat color areas, firm outlines, decorative patterns and tall, narrow formats borrowed from Japanese prints, as in Bonnard’s four-panel Women in the Garden (1890-1891, Musée d’Orsay). Vuillard painted intimate interiors in which figures almost dissolve into patterned wallpaper and fabrics, as in The Seamstress (1893, Indianapolis Museum of Art), while Denis set biblical scenes in modern dress. The Nabis also designed screens, murals, posters and theater sets, and after a last joint exhibition in 1900 they went separate ways.
Expressionism showed the world through emotion, distorting shapes and colors to convey inner experience rather than outward appearance. It turned against Naturalism and Impressionism and drew on Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, James Ensor, African sculpture and the vivid color of the French Fauves. In 1905 four architecture students in Dresden, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and including Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, founded Die Brücke (The Bridge). They painted nudes outdoors and crowded city streets in harsh, unmixed colors with jagged contours, and revived the woodcut. Kirchner’s Street, Berlin (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York) shows stiff, masklike figures on a pink pavement. The word Expressionism took hold only around 1913.
In Munich in 1911 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), named after a Kandinsky painting of 1903. Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee belonged to its circle. Kandinsky held that pure colors and shapes could carry moods by themselves, a conviction that led him toward abstraction. Marc painted animals in symbolic colors, as in The Large Blue Horses (1911, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis). Macke was killed in the First World War in 1914 and Marc in 1916. Münter hid many of the group’s works through the Nazi years and in 1957 gave them to the Lenbachhaus in Munich, which still holds the core of the Blue Rider.
In Vienna, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka turned the style toward nervous, exposed portraits and figures, as in Schiele’s Portrait of Eduard Kosmack (about 1910, Belvedere, Vienna). In Paris, Chaïm Soutine painted landscapes and carcasses of beef in convulsive, heavily loaded brushwork. Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz, marked by the war, painted its wounded and the harsh city life that followed. Expressionism flourished in the Weimar Republic but was condemned under Hitler, and in 1937 the Nazis pilloried it in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. American museums then began acquiring Expressionist works as art of resistance. Its legacy passed to Abstract Expressionism in New York and to Neo-Expressionism from the late 1970s.
Surrealism set out to let the unconscious speak, producing illogical, dreamlike scenes. Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word in 1917, but the movement began with André Breton’s manifesto of 15 October 1924. Breton defined Surrealism as pure psychic automatism, thought dictated free of reason and of aesthetic or moral concern. A rival manifesto by Yvan Goll had appeared two weeks earlier, and the two men came to blows over the name. Drawing on Freud’s ideas about dreams, Breton at first doubted that painting could be Surrealist at all. Techniques such as Max Ernst’s frottage, rubbings taken from wood grain and other textures, settled the question, and in 1925 the Galerie Pierre in Paris held the first exhibition of Surrealist painting.
Joan Miró and André Masson painted floating, biomorphic signs born of automatic drawing, while the empty, shadowed squares that Giorgio de Chirico had painted before 1917 showed how a precise style could make the familiar uncanny. Salvador Dalí, who joined in 1929, painted limp watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York). René Magritte set a pipe above an inscription denying that it is a pipe in The Treachery of Images (1929, Los Angeles County Museum of Art). At the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, visitors received flashlights to see the works beneath 1,200 hanging coal sacks. During the Second World War Breton and many others went to New York, where Surrealism helped shape Abstract Expressionism.
