Episodes
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Stop 22: The Expressionist Tradition
Paula Modersohn-Becker was an important early Expressionist. She was a member of the Worpswede Colony, a group of artists that had retreated to the northern German countryside to paint landscapes.
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Stop 21: Städel: The Nazis and Degenerate Art
The Städel Museum had amassed an incredible collection of Modern Art. However, under Nazi rule, the Städel’s collection was declared ‘degenerate’ and decimated.
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Stop 20: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Freedom in our work and in our lives
The Bridge formed in Dresden in 1905. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a driving force of the group, which renounced earlier traditions of art.
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Stop 19: The Fragmentation of the Avant-Garde
Throughout last century, different groups of artists across Europe were experimenting with bold ideas and forms. Max Ernst was a Dadaist and Surrealist, and Paul Klee part of the Bauhaus movement.
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Stop 18: The Bridge and The Blue Rider
The proto-Modernist movement, the Blaue Reiter group was interested in Cubism and Abstraction. It included Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke, Franz Marc, Alexej Jawlensky and Paul Klee.
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Stop 16: Max Beckmann Part 2
Beckmann’s outlook and style were profoundly affected by his experience of World War I. His paintings are tense and angular, conveying his sense of disquiet and anxiety.
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Stop 17: Max Beckmann Part 3
Declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, Max Beckmann was banned from exhibiting. His later works are full of the dread that settled around Europe during the war years.
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Stop 15: Max Beckmann Part 1
Max Beckmann was a hugely influential German painter. A young prodigy, he dismissed Expressionism and abstraction and insisted that art be an unsentimental look at contemporary life.
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Stop 14: James Ensor: Strange Imaginings
The works of James Ensor, with their strange imaginings and macabre visions, resist categorisation. Ensor and Fernand Khnopff were founding members of the Belgian avant-garde group Les XX – or The Twenty.
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Stop 13: The Nabis
Les Nabis experimented with bold colouring and abstraction, taking inspiration from Paul Gauguin. They included Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Aristide Maillol and Edouard Vuillard.
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Stop 12: Germany: Impressionists and Realists
The ‘Leibl Circle’ was an important group of German Realist artists. An introduction to members Wilhelm Leibl and Wilhelm Trübner, and key figures in Naturalism: Wilhelm Altheim and Fritz von Uhde.
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Stop 11: Germany: Anti-Naturalist Traditions
German anti-Naturalist artists looked to the golden age of Antiquity for their subject matter. Arnold Böcklin, Max Klinger, Anselm and Feuerbach relocated to Rome and became known as ‘German Romans’.
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Stop 10: Symbolism: The Flowers of Evil
Symbolism was a pan-European phenomenon that developed as a reaction to the ‘grubby truths’ of Realism. Gustave Moreau was an important precursor to the Symbolism movement, which included Odilon Redon.
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Stop 09: Degas & Critiques of Impressionism
Although a member of the group, Degas’s painting style contrasted with the predominant French Impressionist style. He was a classical painter and draftsman who depicted modern life.
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Stop 08: Renoir & The Exhibition of Rejects
In 1874 Impressionists Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley mounted a series of exhibitions in defiance of the powerful Paris Salon.
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Stop 07: Courbet & Realism: Art dragged into the gutter
Courbet was part of the French Realist movement, who shunned the subjects of classical imagery to instead paint contemporary life.
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Stop 06: Monet & Impressionism: The light and the air
Monet was the leader of the French Impressionists, a group who dragged their easels outside to paint en plein air to capture the changeable nature of light and colour.
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Stop 05: Corot & the Barbizon School: The harmony of the tones
French artist Jean-Baptist Corot was a leading member of the Barbizon School, a group that championed Realism and whose plein air studies of nature anticipated the work of the Impressionists.
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Stop 04: Romanticism: Painting is life itself!
An introduction to Claude Monet’s pre-Impressionist work and French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix, who brought passion and intensity to historical and mythological subject matter.
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Stop 03: The Nazarenes
The Nazarenes were a religious association of Viennese artists working in Rome, who rejected the highly formal traditions of the Academy to create work that was a statement of their feelings and beliefs.
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Stop 02: A Focus on Nature: Friedrich and Dahl
Against a tradition of Neo-Classicism, artists began to record their observations of nature. German painters Caspar David Friedrich and Johann Christian Dahl sought to evoke ethereal elements such as clouds or light.
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Stop 01: Introduction to Städel and His Museum
Narrator William McInnes provides an historical overview of Frankfurt and Germany in the 1800s, a period in which Johann Frederick Städel began building what would become a significant personal art collection.