Emil Nolde
Amidst a period of unification and the eventual collapse of Germany’s national identity, an alliance of artists emerged. Defying traditional academy art training, the German Expressionist artists and their movement was a stance on the renewal of German Art. It was initiated with the focus on primitive cultures, glorifying their lack of Westernization by the means of ethnography. Emil Nolde’s fascination with the ideals of a primitive civilization employed the very essence of German expressionism; the emotion, the energy and the spiritual freedom he embodied in his art became immoral and controversial amongst the modernists and conservatives in Germany. Emil Hansen was born in 1867 into a family of farmers, he changed his last name to Nolde in 1902 out of respect to the Danish-German region of his birthplace. Breaking with family traditions of farming Emil decided to pursue art. Early on, his favor toward nontraditional European art was apparent in his pencil sketches of Egyptian and Assyrian sculptures he drew in 1880. He also began painting landscapes of the German countryside and scenes of the ocean, and local …show more content…
The Die Brucke was a group of architecture students, without formal art training, that came together to explore individuality from the orthodox methods of artistry. The Brucke was formalized in Dresden, Germany in 1905; they derived techniques from Arts and Crafts along with Jugendstil (“youth art”) as the means of their expression. They were also highly inspired by anti-western societies, specifically African and Oceanic cultures because they felt they exemplified purity and the true essence of humanity. Each artist mastered their own style yet kept similar annotations such as quick and bold strokes, distorted perspectives and the use of bold colors as seen in Nolde’s