“Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth,” German artist Franz Marc once wrote. “All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.” When the German Expressionists searched for a way to get back to basics and recover for the present what they saw as the lost primitive passions of the past, they turned to printmaking and the graphic arts as the ideal medium. In German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art through July 11, 2011, the glory days of German Expressionism, both before and after World War I, live again. The content of these graphic works—life, love, war, peace—inspires, informs, and even offends, but never fails to touch something inside you with the “genuine” force Marc wrote about that “guarantees its truth.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Graphic Content."
[Image: Franz Marc. Riding School After Ridinger (Reitschule nach Ridinger). 1913. Woodcut. Composition: 10 9/16 x 11 3/4" (26.9 x 29.8 cm); sheet: 12 13/16 x 14 3/4" (32.5 x 37.5 cm). Publisher: unpublished. Printer: Maria Marc. Edition: One of an unknown number of posthumous impressions. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1940.]
[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials for German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs through July 11, 2011.]
