Sunrise ~ Sun, Aug 29

August 31st, 2010 | By Kelly Hayes-Raitt | 1 Comment »

“Art brings the subconscious into the sunlight,” Henri Laurens, a Surrealist sculptor active during the beginning half of the last century wrote. I spent yesterday at the Alte Nationalgalerie, (www.smb.museum) the fabulous Neue Nationalgalerie (www.smb.museum) and today at the Brücke-Museum, (www.bruecke-museum.de) learning about the Dresden “bridge” artists who painted in the early 1900s. Influenced at first by Van Gogh and later by the French Fauvists, their work is startlingly colorful, more defined than the Impressionists who preceded them and less abstract than the Surrealists who follow them. Several of Die Brücke artists traveled to the South Pacific and painted “primitives” – native masks, native people in natural, unclothed settings – a real departure from the highly coiffed Impressionists and portraiturists of the time – and their work later caught Hitler’s eye.

Most of these artists’ work was confiscated by the Nazis and displayed in a 1937 exhibit in Munich called “Degenerative Art.” In all, the Nazis confiscated more than 20,000 works by more than 200 artists. (more…)