• The German Revolution - Expressionist Prints

The German Revolution - Expressionist Prints

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This paperback publication accompanies an exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.

“The German Revolution (1918–1919) was a period of anarchy and violence that broke out at the end of the First World War, in Berlin and other cities. This publication accompanies a centenary exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, from 1 March to 25 August 2019 and focuses on the revolutionary printmaking that emerged in Germany in the years 1906-1926. The works are drawn from the Hunterian’s own exceptional holdings of German Expressionist art, supplemented by Max Beckmann’s set of 11 lithographs, Hell, lent by the National Galleries of Scotland. This monumental series encapsulates the terror, hunger and sheer misery that gripped the city of Berlin, which had been the German World’s great international centre for the production and exhibition of art. Artists such as the Beckmann turned to printmaking of various kinds from commercial necessity. This was the great period of the woodcut, led by the Norwegian Edvard Munch, who inspired many to take up a medium which has dramatic persuasive power. Artists often turned their backs on the physical detruction and looked inwards. Munch, Kokschka, Sheiele, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Pechstein, Heckel, Brlacg, Dix, Grosz, Corinth and Paula Modersohn-Becker all made prints exploring human stories which are linked thematically in two sections of the exhibition and seem to have arisen as an antidote to the disaster of the war: Love and Anxiety, A Bridge to Utopia.”

Publisher: The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
ISBN: 978-0-904254-99-0
Dimensions: 22 x 28 cm