European Masters: Audioguide

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.

The Städel Museum had amassed an incredible collection of Modern Art. However, under Nazi rule, the Städel’s collection was declared ‘degenerate’ and decimated.

The Bridge formed in Dresden in 1905. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a driving force of the group, which renounced earlier traditions of art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

In 1874 Impressionists Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley mounted a series of exhibitions in defiance of the powerful Paris Salon.

Courbet was part of the French Realist movement, who shunned the subjects of classical imagery to instead paint contemporary life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.