Crowther : Origins of Modernism and the Avant Garde

This is Chapter Two

of Paul Crowther’s 

‘The Phenomenology of Modern Art", 2012

The text has been quoted in this color

Note: Mr. Crowther writes philosophy- not art history or criticism.

He introduces specific works of art only as they relate to his ideas.

His discussion of those examples, however, is his only text that interests me.

So I jump from painting to painting

giving my own response to the piece before studying his.

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Manet, Luncheon in the Grass, 1862-3

The "origins of modernism and the avant garde" are whatever artists so-identified take from 30,000 years of art history.

All the other origin narratives are ultimately about marketing- of art as well as ideas - and there is always an incentive to present something as new and improved.  So this query does not concern me.

But the specific paintings Crowther discusses do.

The first such painting is  shown above.

For me — "Dejeuner sur L'Herbe"  echoes this provocative piece from seven years earlier:

Courbet,  "The Painter’s Studio", 1855

 

Both present the young Parisian  artist's social circle, a landscape, and a nude young woman.

 

And both were made to snub, and be snubbed by, the Academy -

putting the great tradition of painting in the service of an artist's personal Bohemian  lifestyle instead of church, empire, or classical mythology.  One might note that most of their work was not so confrontational.

Manet has cranked the insouciance up a  notch - with the nude facing the viewer, the pictorial box challenged by the distant figure out of proportion, and an overall pictorial space that feels as strangely  jumbled as it is balanced.  Courbet was serious about his self importance - and his piece feels like the catalog entry for "Courbet" in a ponderous encyclopedia.  Manet, however,  is serious here about nothing but painting - and his playful piece continues to be alluring and intriguing.  I recall it once being blown up to a 50 foot mural on the side of a building.  It seemed so enticingly appropriate for its upscale Chicago business district.  

It's as if the cute girl was packed up for the picnic along with  other comestibles.

Quite naughty - then and now.

 

 In these remarks, Duranty sees a continuity between the impressionist treatment of the city, and its treatment of nature. At the heart of both is a relation between transient appearances and a mobile observer. The poetry of the visual work is not realized through contemplative abstraction and withdrawal from it; it involves, rather, a leisurely involvement and successive focusing on its diversity and shifting nuances.

An interesting example to consider here is Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe of 1863 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris). The audience of the time was scandalized by the juxtaposition of a naked woman and a semi-dressed one, with two men in dandyish contemporary apparel. In its sexual provocativeness, the painting is a restrained anticipation of later fauve and expressionist licence. Indeed, in even addressing a contemporary scene, it is at odds with academic painting's historical and classical orientations. For present purposes, however, I shall emphasize other factors. 

The painting does not conceal the brushstrokes that bring forth its illusionistic content, and, in some areas, indeed, even seems unfinished. In this respect, the work exemplifies that emergence of Figure from material ground or 'diagram' that Deleuze sees as so central to modern painting. However, the character of this Figure is extremely ambiguous. With a complex group like this, one would expect the painting to strike us as highly composed and thought through. Actually this is not the case.

 However, contrived the group is, in terms of actual composition, qua Figure, it tends to suspend this by making it appear somewhat disorganized. There is, in fact, a strong sense of instability to the work. One aspect of this is spatial inconsistency or oddness - such as the semi-clothed woman appearing much nearer to the viewer than she should, and the curious jumble in the way that the figures in the central group are disposed towards one another - both in terms of gesture and physical juxtaposition. 

The visual effect of this instability is to compress pictorial place, and produce a flatter looking painting. But the question is, what is at issue in this emphasis? An answer (in speculative terms, at least) might focus on the dynamic of the group's gazes. 

The naked woman appears to be addressing the viewer directly while the frontally presented man is looking at someone a few degrees further over. They are engaged with the viewer, but the man on the viewer's right is addressing his gesture and gaze to his companions - and seems 'out of synch' with the viewer's arrival. Likewise the semi-dressed woman seems to have drifted into a different setting altogether. 

 
I would suggest that what Manet is tending towards through these 'awkward' features is an evocation of the presence of a participating mobile viewer. The image is evoking, if not representing overtly, a synthesis of passing or passed moments, wherein the viewer is relating, or has related to the group. Awkward compositional elements, in other words, here suggest the spontaneity and transience of visual perception, and the reciprocal relation between that which is seen and the one who sees it. 

 

 It could be a collection of passed moments -though such moments could just as well be concurrent and disconnected.  What Crowther does not mention is Manet's concern, and mastery, of European figure painting.  (especially of Velasquez)

 

 

 

 

 Monet's Le Pont de l'Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877

Other painters engage with this spontaneity and ephemerality of the visual encounter, on different stylistic terms. Consider, for example, Monet's Le Pont de l'Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare of 1877 (Musée Marmottan, Paris). Here, the figures and machines, the daylight and steam, are forms and masses equalized in visual terms. In particular, the drifting clouds of steam serve to both carry the spectator's gaze into the distance, and, yet, at the same time, suggest a gentle counter-motion tending towards envelopment of the viewer. This carries the epistemological implication that the relation between subject and object of experience is not an absolutely fixed division, but rather one which is constantly transformed by new circumstances. The subject and his or her world are, in a constant state of reciprocal interaction and modification. 

 

 This piece does seem more to the point of spontaneity and ephemerality - with such large masses being so vaporous in the foreground.  Yet we might also note it emerges from the canvas as a single, joyful breath - and that's why we see it at all.

Kazimir Malevitch, Englishman in Moscow, 1914, 35 x 22

Similar to a promotional travel poster - with a message something like "Visit the energetic and puzzling Russian Avant-garde "

 

 

Crowther envelops this piece into the following discussion:

……..The only experimental content or innovation is a sense of the outré for its own sake - and even this is negated by insertion into the publicity, media, and managerial struc tures of the art world, where innovation for the sake of it is a dreary norm. The avant-garde in this context gives way to the demands of fashion and careerism and amounts to no more than that.

 Does this mean, then, that the time of the avant-garde has now gone forever? Not necessarily. To see why this is so, we must briefly consider some key points concerning Kasimir Malevich and his intellectual milieu. Like other avant-gardists, Malevich ratifies his work by reference to metaphysics, most notably that of Schopenhauer." However, his visual idioms have a diversity and radical experimental quality, which point beyond any single link between pictorial means and a single absolute conception of phenomenological truth. Indeed, the influence of Zaum theory - concerning the possibility of a trans-rational language gives Malevich's work a special significance.

 The reason for this is that, as we have seen, what makes avant-gardism more than the merely new or modern, is its re-thinking of pictorial means so as to codify some central conceptions of phenomenological truth in an aesthetic form. We have also seen that the absoluteness of these conceptions tends to paralyse further substantial creative development in the artists concerned. However, suppose we focus on what is common to all these efforts and ignore the specific answers, which they give. 

In these general terms, we might say that to be avant-garde involves the invention of new artistic codes and idioms so as to comprehend the phenomenological elusiveness of the real. The scope of Malevich's practice as artist, designer, and theorist is an exemplar of this flexibility. His work is enormously complex and refuses to cash-out in terms of some exact 'absolute' style. This is illustrated marvellously in his Englishman in Moscow, of 1914.

I’m feeling strangeness as an appealing hook to summon momentary attention- but not profound enough to drive endless investigation.  

The foreground, the central figure's form, and the background are fused, using structures that blend a sense of the facet with that of the geometrical solid. These features and their spatial distribution, the overall planar emphasis of presentation, and the use of lettering, all evoke the visual character of cubist space. However, what is more striking is Malevich's stylistic re-appropriation of this. In his work the individual forms are much more distinct than those in Braque's and Picasso's cubist works. 

Indeed, in great contrast with their paintings and collages, the pictorial space in this work is not created through the distending and merging of the represented object with the surrounding space (or with spatially contiguous objects) or with the picture plane itself. Rather the composition is based on a psychology of visual declaration or association where pictorial elements such as the fish, church, candle, and the ladder, may be reflections in a window or in a mirror that the Englishman is gazing into, or they may be visualizations of things that represent psychological barriers between him and his perception of Russia. 

Or they may just be there to create the disquieting feeling that results from receiving a communication that is impossible to  comprehend.

Whatever, the case, this is a kind of playing with space, in every sense. It carries the suggestion that visual reality is not only constantly mobile in terms of the viewer's relation to ever-changing objects, but that this relation is both obscured and clarified, and re-routed through mediation by psychological and cultural symbols. And in this case, the symbolism runs to a more meta physical level. The Russian words in the picture mean 'eclipse’  (at the top) which has been divided into two words that suggest 'beyond the dark'. The words towards the bottom mean ‘partial' divided so as to suggest the words hour and 'hourly.

 What is evoked by all these terms, is a temporary but partial  loss of light that will be overcome in lime. It is this which explains the symbolic significance of the represented objects. The church, and the cross formed from the candle and the sword, will, in time, remove the scales (embodied in the fish) from the Englishman's hypnotically fixated eyes, and allow him to see the light. On these terms, then, Malevich's Englishman is himself a symbol of cultural and religious alienation, functioning as both an individual outsider, and as a symbol of a deeper outsiderliness. At the same time, however, Malevich inscribes this pictorially speaking, with the possibility of redemption in both dimensions. 

Was Malevitch known as a proselytizing Christian? Can any other of his paintings be interpreted this way?

Now an image such as this can be analysed, but in the concrete perception of it, these analytic factors are drawn back, and made strange through the specific manner in which they cohere, inseparably, in the visual unity of the image itself. As a focus of visual and psychological complexity, the picture does not allow our sense of the individual's immersion in visual real-ity, to settle into some edifying formula.

 Given that Malevich's Zaum sensibility is centred on the elusiveness of the real rather than some end system that is the recurrent goal of new signifying practices, then this is a clue to what an enduring avant-garde might be. In negative terms such an avant-garde will acknowledge that no world-changing system or utopian ideal will be the result of its activity. It is this ambition, indeed, which contextualizes the avant-garde as part of modernism. In positive terms, the task is to continue exploring possible codes, which articulate elusive key phenomenological structures of the real, but without trying to absolutize the visual idioms in which they are to be expressed. 

So as long as an avant-garde practice remains elusive, it may endure as such.  But what if nobody cares to pursue it?  Is there any reason to keep on chasing after the meaning of a Malevitch other than his brand recognition in art history?

I have argued, then, that the rise of modernism and the avant-garde centres on a gradual change in how the ontological reciprocity of subject and object of experience is understood in broad cultural, societal, and philosophical terms. The dynamism of the relation finds expression through the rhythms of urban life, and through this, into painting. Eventually, the reciprocity of subject and object of experience is such as to demand new pictorial codes, and a more active involvement of visual art media themselves as elements in this reciprocity. Through all this, the four major stylistic features that I identified in the Introduction to this book, are engaged. 

Couldn’t the change from High Renaissance to Baroque also be discussed as "the ontological reciprocity of subject and object of experience"?  Such reciprocity is always changing.

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self Portrait as soldier, 1915

A strange dynamic painting.  The subject seems cold, miserable and maimed.  The nude young woman behind him is something he owns, as either a painting (this is the self portrait of an artist) or as a sexual companion. (He did date his models). Altogether unpleasant - but it does seem to be how he felt about his life at that low point in both his and European history. There’s the thrill - or maybe you could call it despair - of a real life. It’s not a fantasy- and the artist made it feel very important - even urgent. And the design feels so fresh and unexpected.  The eyebrows of the man echo the shadows beneath the breasts of the woman. And the white arrow head emerging in the upper left raises the tension.

The essential context for Nietzsche's claims about art is, of course, his overall philosophical position. This position is encapsulated in the following remarks:

 .there is only one world, and this is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, without meaning - a world thus constituted is the real world. We have need of lies in order to live - that lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence.'

I’m so glad Crowther pulled Nietzsche into the discussion of this painting.  Whether or not Kirchner ever read him - he seems so appropriate.  Also, sadly, appropriate for Maga Republicans - as well as Nazis and every other totalitarian state.  So I would add:  we need Truth even more - and it needs to be cherished.

 By ‘lies' Nietzsche means the general production of illusion. Indeed, he goes on to claim that man must be a liar by nature - which amounts, in his terms, to being an artist. In The Gay Science, this rhetorical characterization is cashed out in more specific terms, as follows: 

What one should learn from artists. - How can we make things beautiful and attractive when they are not? - Moving away from things until there is a good deal one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are to see them at all; or seeing things round a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives.? Nietzsche is emphasizing here the capacity of artistic style to change the world's appearance. 

I do happen to disagree.  The world is often beautiful - and so are people.  Art can have beauty of a different order - that’s mostly independent of whatever is being mimiced.

And from The Gay Science (1882, revised 1887): 

everywhere, . .., I see the delight in all the coarser eruptions and gestures of passion. What is demanded nowadays is a certain convention of passionateness - anything but genuine passion! Nevertheless, passion itself will be reached this way, and our descendents will not only indulge in savage and unruly forms, but will be really savage." 

Does seem prescient of 20th C. Germany - as well as this painting - as savage/brutish  as the life of chimpanzees.

On these terms, the 'feel' of Nietzsche's own rhetorical style - his savouring of attack - might encourage a much more sensuously aggressive attitude in painters who were familiar with his writing. This could well point towards those features which characterize German expressionism - namely, a willingness to define forms in emphatically stylized linear or schematic terms and to render both these and broader shapes and masses with unabashed colouristic intensity. The physicality and texture of paint and brushwork is manifest. Elements of tonal modelling and perspectival recession are diminished accordingly. 

All of which applies to this painting 

In terms of content, an art of this sort will be orientated towards subjects that can be sensually provocative - such as the nude - or which have archaic resonances or associations (as in primitive art), or an immediate and direct relation to the artist's own experience of the social and physical environment. It is worth considering, now, how this will to art might be related to specific expressionist works. In this respect, consider Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner's Self Portrait as a Soldier, 1915.  The picture was painted during Kirchner's convalescence during military service. Its colours are vivid and direct but curiously off-key, and sour. They invest the work with a dreamlike intensity, that makes itself uncanny by the fact that the basic components of the work - the artist in his studio with a model - are not at all dreamlike in terms of what they are literally. 

The colors remind me of medieval German paintings of the Passion.  And yes - both dreamlike (nightmarish) and all too real.

Kirchner's own features and that of the model in the background, are articulated in the simplified, stylized way characteristic of the non-western sculptures that were so important for so many avant-garde artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their angularity invests flesh with a heroism and monumentality - a kind of direct generalization of being human that is in the starkest contrast with the universalizing treatments of the human form in more academic art. 

Also an edginess - anxiety - temporality 

Of especial note is the curious spatial relation between the artist and the model. She is in the background, but with the space between artist and model so compressed that she appears to be almost perched on his shoulder - her gaze addressing both the painting in the background, and Kirchner's military headgear. The perspectival inconsistency on which this conjunction is based, accentuates the psychological loading of the painting. The artist is in the military, but all the things he is as a practicing artist, and as a man with desire for both art and the erotic, crowd in upon his sad present military identity. 

Yes - a curious spatial relationship - the woman like a parrot on his shoulder.

Everything in the work converges on the pained relation between the artist's 'hands'. In the painting, the right one is not there (even though Kirchner, himself, had not been so mutilated). All we have is the grotesque symbolic stump. And the left one, while present, is distorted in a dislocated gesture that seems to aspire to hold a paintbrush, but cannot do so. 

In this respect, the most personal fear of an artist - to have the means to artistic creation destroyed - are given a direct exemplification, through sensuous means that are themselves brutal. 

Now, in addressing works of art, it is always important to avoid reading-in meanings - to interpret in terms of personal associations provoked by the work, but which are not sustained by what is in the picture. In the present case, however, different considerations are at issue. The features that I have identified are inescapable. And this is the point about expressionism. Such works are primally direct in terms of how they evoke the painter's experience. They have the sensual primal directness of the Nietzschean will to art, in the most uncompromising terms. The artist is the greatest sufferer, and this realm of directness is what art must be about, ultimately. 

All of the above seems incontrovertible - but why care about this suffering (and clearly sexist) person - except for the formal power of the painting.

Karl Schmitt-Rottluff - Woman with a Bag, 1915

A scene that is ordinary but compelling.  Not much color - and she’s  not very appealing at this moment of anxiety   But you’re  not a voyeur/tourist/outsider in this painting— the subject interacts with the viewer.  It’s a lively slice of urban street life.

Consider also, Woman with a Bag (Frau mit Tasche) by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.This painting lacks the overt tortured content of Kirchner's picture, but retains its own directness of visual address. There is a sly informality about the way the woman adjusts her hat/hair, and holds her bag - the kind of informality, indeed, that might characterize a photographic snapshot. 

However, the woman's facial features are elongated through adaption to the idioms of non-western sculpture. This formal device carries expressive meaning beyond mere stylization. For it makes the woman's gaze enigmatic in the way it returns the gaze of the viewer. 

There are many modernist works - such as Manet's treatments of female subjects where the sitter returns the gaze in enigmatic terms (e.g. the celebrated Bar of the Folies Bergiere). However, the sitter's context in such works situates the psychological encounter in a kind of matter-of-fact existential environment . This means that her gaze is the kind of enigma we all know and love, and which forms one of the pleasant features of encounters with others. 

A nice way of putting it - and it continues an earlier discussion of the passing moments of modern painting.

But in Schmidt-Rottluf's painting, the subdued range of colouring, slight disposition of the head, and melancholic elongation of her facial features, eliminate the matter-of-fact context, and replace it with a space of ambiguity that makes enigma more difficult. Simply, the complexity of encountering the Other, and what the Other is thinking and feeling, are thrust upon the viewer without the mediation of a narrative context. Here, the existential encounter is all. It is direct in its presentation of, in effect, the lack of directness in the way the human gaze is returned, sometimes. The space of feeling between people - its uncertainties, and moment-to-moment character, is paramount. 

All of which is well said -  though it only addresses narrative.  If only he might query that special quality of thrusting-upon-the -viewer that he notices and I enjoy.

Franz Marc, Animal Fates, 1913,   77" x 105"

(The right third destroyed by fire - restored by Paul Klee)

Quite an exciting piece- especially if we imagine the right side in full color.

For me - it could as well present the emergence of life as the destruction of it.

I feel wonder - not terror.

An "out of the cradle endlessly rocking"

Finally, it is worth addressing Franz Marc's Animal Fates 1913.  The rear of this picture contains the inscription ‘And all being is flaming agony'. But even without reference to this iconographic [ture , the work conveys such pain directly, within its own internal resources. The work's colouring is intensely vivid, and the environmental forms in the left of the picture are rendered with a lightness and insistent instability. There is at once the suggestion of the beauty of a natural habitat, but also its despoiling - especially through the zone of dark forms on the viewer's right, which seem to be violating the habitat features on the left, in a destructive struggle. Through this, any spatial distinction between background and foreground is overcome through the tumult of what is being depicted both literally and metaphorically . There is a panic of form. 

How could  Crowther not know that the "dark zone of figures to the viewer’s right" is an area that was destroyed in  a warehouse fire and later repainted with darker colors???  This book was published in 2012 — why didn’t he look it up on the internet???

 Apparently there exists a watercolor study for it — I wish I could find it online.

It should be emphasized, also, that these contextual factors at once amplify, and are amplified by, the emphatic death posture of the deer itself. Its thrown-back head exemplifies the actual killing of the creature, and the fact that this death is an effect of a more general anti-life momentum. The work's overall impression, indeed, is of violent destructive frenzy. 

There is a sharp contrast between the Bambi-like elegance of the rearing-up deer and the jagged angularity of what’s behind it.  Marc’s sentimental fondness for animals seems rather distant from Nietzche.

It is time, now, to consider the broader art-historical context. The idiom of expressionism has a significance that ranges far beyond German art. As noted earlier, it fits fauvism to some degree, and is relevant also to much American abstract expressionism. In terms of the latter, this is hardly surprising. Nietzsche was well known in American intellectual and artistic circles by the 1930s. More significantly, these circles were also subject to alienating societal pressures similar to those found in Germany and to an expanded awareness of the possibilities of 'primitive' art. These conditions, indeed, are operative in most twentieth-century capitalist societies. In its primal directness, the expressionist tendency should be seen generally as one particular strategy of resistance to urban alienation and cultural repression - a means of expressing fundamentals of human existence, rather than societal distortions of it. 

Jackson Pollock : Number Ia,  1948.  68" x 8’8’

For me, this is the triumph of dramatic mark making over the piece as a whole - which is considered while applying each layer - but never achieved.   So it has collapsed  into a sticky, clotted mess - begging to be swept away, like hair on the floor of a barber shop.

Again, it is worth considering some specific examples. First, Jackson Pollock's Number Ia, 1948.  This work is one of Pollock's so-called action paintings' where the painter would pour, drip, and flick paint onto an unstretched canvas placed on the floor. The elimination of studied gesture in the placing of paint, is, in itself, an attempt at some more direct idiom of communication. Indeed, for Pollock himself, this mode of practice seems to have been taken as a means to evoking levels of unconscious symbolism that would be elided by a more conventional easel-painting approach. 

And there is more besides. In this respect, it is interesting that Pollock has created the work in very economical planar terms. There is a background plane that supports a shallow central plane packed with writhing forms. This animated effect arises, especially, because the coloured surface that constitutes the background plane shows through - and accentuates the animation of the forms by providing a static context against which they can stand out.

 In addressing this work, one should bear in mind, also, that while - as we shall see in Chapter Four - the planar structure of painting involves a virtual immobilization of content - Pollock's abstraction nevertheless evokes a sense of ceaseless becoming. And in this he is true to organic process in general. Individual finite things and states of affairs come into being and pass away, but as a general process, this generation and decay does not stop. It has an element of constancy.

 Pollock's optical-planar evocation of process means that both the transient individual dimension and the constancy of process, per se, are made complementary, and are, thence, expressed with a directness that eludes more figurative modes of representation.

Crowther’s explanation is so much more compelling than the actual piece - prefiguring the triumph of conceptual art and Tom Wolfe’s "The Painted Word"

Willem DeKooning, Excavation, 1950

Many other "Abstract Expressionist" paintings, like the above, show more cohesion,

even if it’s at the expense of wanton momentary self expression.

Another important Nietschean abstract expressionist is Mark Rothko. He was influenced by Nietesche's Birth of Tragedy, and, in his most sustained piece of writing on art, follows its logic through, quite explicitly, to the conclusion that " it is through the tragic element that we seem to achieve the generalization of human emotionality." These remarks were made around 1940-1.

 In the next seven years or so, he created many rather static and extremely graceful quasi-surrealist works such as Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea of 1944 (Museum of Modern Art, New York]) where the dimension of tragedy is not at all explicit. 

However, towards the end of the 1940s an important stylistic transformation occurs. The biomorphic elements in his work are gradually eliminated in favour of fragile areas of colours hat suggest shape only in the most veiled terms. And, in turn, these are refined further into compositions based on bands of colour - a 'sectional' format that remains with him to the end of his career. 

Mark Rothko,  #14, 1961

 

Consider, for example, No. 14 (Horizontals, White over Darks) of 1961. This work is especially dark in both literal colouristic terms, and metaphorically. Like all Rothko's sectional compositions, the bands of colour are distributed over a relatively uniform background colour plane. In optical terms they appear in front of this plane, or to be bled into it, or, (more rarely) as indented upon it or even behind it. 

In the present case, all these relations are present to varying degrees. Of special importance are the boundary areas where the bands relate to the background plane and to one another - the so-called 'areas of violence'. What makes these so important is their recontextualization of the phenomenological significance of the bands. Generally speaking, horizontal bands of uniform colour, are stable - even monumental in terms of their potential visual stability. They echo and reinforce the planarity of painting's basic format. 

However, the fineness of their internal differentiation, and their fraying edges in Rothko's work, serve to invert this significance - or, better, put it in suspense. There is, indeed, the suggestion of monumentality, but it is achieved through means that evoke its transitoriness in the most direct terms. The reciprocity of Being and Becoming is illuminated through the suggestion of precariousness and dissolution. There is something of this in Pollock's animated forms also, but Rothko takes this to an even more sensuously basic level by evoking it through colour as form, per se. Rather than dwelling on the particular details of the transient world, Rothko presents the inseparable-ness of Being and Becoming (and thence the transience of all things) as an inescapable absolute - the universal that determines everything. 

It is this which makes Rothko's work an expression of the tragic in the most direct and pervasive sense. And this is true even when his banded compositions employ colours that are brighter and more ecstatic in their connotations. For the ecstatic is bought at the price of knowing that ecstasy - by its very nature - comes, so as to go. The fore-knowing of this destiny is implicated in the character of ecstatic experience, itself. 

No  wonder the guy killed himself — oblivion being  one possible escape from the "inescapable absolute"

I cannot comment on this piece based on a tiny image on my screen.  It was meant to envelop the viewer.

I have seen some Rothko in person - and felt wonder, but not tragedy. Again, Crowther makes a lot of sense - and Rothko does belong in an essay about Nietzsche and 20th C. art - though I wonder whether whether N. would have recognized this object as art.  I don’t — it’s aesthetics are too ordinary.  It’s a very collectible (and thus expensive) meditational aid that could be cheaply reproduced if many people really were serious about using it as such.

(Btw - I can find no evidence that N. ever collected any art at all.  Not sure why his thoughts about it should be taken seriously - except that they have been)

George Baselitz - B Fur Larry, 1985, 98 x 79"

What about the  Neo-Expressionists ?

The problem is, however, whether a mere impulse to extreme painterly figuration of itself warrants the term 'Expressionist. Extreme painterliness may relate to the set of the Nietzschean stylistic traits in terms of which I described the expressionist tendency earlier on, but looseness in the handling of paint also characterizes many other tendencies in art. Indeed to describe painterly figuration as such as 'Neo-Expressionist is to water down the complex theoretical and practical elements which make expressionism into a quite specific stylistic strategy of resistance to alienation and repression.

 However, there is at least one major figure who warrants the term. I refer to Georg Baselitz. Consider, for example, his B für Larry of 1967. 

 
This work focuses on a central male figure wearing only a loin garment, with arms splayed in the position of crucifixion. Again, the figure's facial expression is fundamentally passive. What gives the picture its overtly violent dimension are the four savage dogs which surround and hem in the figure. One of these has sunk its teeth into his outstretched arm. 

The dimension which energizes a sense of violation, however, is not this literal component. It consists, rather, in an articulation of space which wrenches, dismembers and relocates some of the forms within it. The dogs, for example, are each rendered in terms of a head and half a body, with one exception - which is given in full profile. 

Even so, this dog is itself delineated in a sketchy and incomplete manner, with the two parts of its torso seeming to be torn apart. Baselitz's choice of savage dogs in this and other works is possibly a symbol of male sexuality in its most aggressive mode. 

One might even see the overall structure of these works - savage dogs wrenched apart in space - as a kind of sublimation of the violence of the sexual act itself. 

For me, this Arcadian scene can’t help but bring to mind Acteon torn to pieces by his hounds after violating the privacy of the virgin goddess. So sexuality is indeed involved - though in this case Acteon is hardly a victim.  He seems to enjoy being the center of attention even if he’s being torn to pieces.  No terror or tragedy in this scene - just gentle humor about the human condition.  Lust can’t help but get us in trouble.

 

Humor is one strategy of resistance to alienation and repression - though it does not seem to have much to do with Nietzsche.  It’s the way of motley fool, not the professional philologist.

A much earlier variant.

Actaeon has grown antlers, just as Baselitz has in some other pieces.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the stylizing and schematizing aspects of Baselitz's painterly style come more and more into a dominant position, and define his work of the 1980s. Indeed, they intersect perfectly with another - already established tendency in his work (from the end of the 1960s) namely his painting of images in an inverled form. 

One of the most impressive instances of this is Nachtessen in Dresden of 1983  Here a group of Dresdeners eat their meal at night. Is this the night of the terror bombing and firestorm of April 1945? Even if it is not, the Munch-like sparsity and contortion of the forms and facial expressions connotes the full horrors of this event. And even if one overlooks the name Dresden in the title, the brutality of reductionism apropos shape, environment and facial expression, is one that, in its abstractness, connotes primal horror as such.

Maybe I’m a spoiled optimist - but I feel humorous exaggeration - not primal horror. Someone is having a bad night out. Or actually - since the upside down screaming head is in the center - it's autobiographical : "I am having a bad night out".  It's a sitcom.  (Btw - this is the first Baselitz piece found that I’d like to own)

(But then - I also feel "The Scream" by Munch to be a stitch )

Ernst Barlach, Christ at Gethsemane, 1919

Here’s a non-humorous depiction of hopeless despair.

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So - which above pieces reflect an alienation specific to the modern urban, industrial, capitalist world?

The modern world is predominantly secular - and, appropriately, these secular pieces are outside a world with spiritual significance.  But as we may note in the above woodcut, expressionist art can also be quite effective with sacred subject matter.

I would say these paintings just reflect the human condition- in which alienation is a recurring theme.

But still —  Art like this cannot be found in earlier eras.

It’s only in modern times that artists, and art lovers, have had the opportunity to highly cultivate  such personal art.