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GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST PRINTS GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST PRINTS Since 1985 I have regularly shown the graphic work, the drawings and prints, of Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, so it is not really a big step to look back to their stylistic antecedents, the German Expressionists. Auerbach and Freud were both born in Germany and it is not too fanciful to think that had they stayed, as students they would have looked at the work of Beckmann, Nolde, Heckel and others, as it was they came to England. A love affair can start with seeing a face across a room. My affair with the German Expressionists really started when I saw the Max Beckmann, Self Portrait, woodcut 1922, across a gallery at the Beckmann retrospective in 2000 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. This image has haunted me over the past few years and still delights me today. To me one of the joys of the German Expressionists is the importance of prints in their oeuvre; the same can be said in our time of Freud but I do find it delightfully perverse that the ‘Die Bruke’ artists should celebrate their escape from city life to the freedom of the seaside and the country through the rather sombre medium of the etching and the woodcut. This exhibition includes the work of many of the most important artists associated with German Expressionism and concentrates on prints between 1913 and 1923. RI 2008 |