'German Expressionist Prints’ At The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

:Unique stylistically and projecting a long-awaited visual beacon of revolution and individualism at the start of the Twentieth Century, German Expressionists broke new ground in the art world with their bold and poignant imagery. The Expressionist groups Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brucke and the postwar trend of Neue Sachlichkeit all laid the foundation for new social trends by fueling public passion. Although relatively short-lived, the Expressionist movement is as equally respected today as it was a century ago.

Celebrating the movement, the exhibition "Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints" is on view through October 26 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Organized by and consisting of works from the Syracuse University art collection, "Impassioned Images" explores the visions of numerous artists who engaged their charged emotions via printmaking.

Presented in the art center's prints and drawings galleries, the exhibition presents 50 woodcuts, lithographs and etchings by many of the seminal German artists of the early Twentieth Century.

Each of the Expressionist groups is represented by a range of vigorous works and the exhibition includes prints by the cream of the movement's printmakers, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Erich Heckel, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Wassily Kandinsky.

In the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Germany forged a vital multifaceted movement in the arts that encompassed architecture, painting, printmaking and sculpture with a variety of other forms of the arts, including prose, music and theater. This pluralistic modern movement, simply coined as Expressionism, was considered visionary, and it rebelled against the staid constraints of a German Empire society that retreated from the destitute populations crowding into industrialized cities. During these years, art became a tool that encouraged a freer, fairer and more spiritual world, and a world where the emotions were integral to life. As Kirchner, perhaps the most influential artist from this era, stated, Expressionists wanted to "express inner conviction…with sincerity and spontaneity."

Prints became a favored medium among German Expressionists, who found that powerful utopian or critical messages could be relayed to numerous audiences through individual sheets, print portfolios, posters, manifestoes or literary journals.

Religious, moral, social and political issues were confronted with an energy and immediacy not previously seen in the art academies. Even the media they used — woodcut, drypoint, lithography and etching — were handled in a startlingly more direct manner, often resulting in distorted and exaggerated forms not found in the technically more refined prints of the day. Aggressive and new use of the media became the hallmark of the German Expressionist artists.