The History of Neuroscience in Five Acts

Cornelia Feye, MA

This series will provide an in-depth look at the lives and work of four prominent twentieth-century German artists.

September 30: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Wassily Kandinsky is credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession, Kandinsky began painting at the age of 30 after seeing an exhibition by Monet. In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and then founding the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) with Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter, and others. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. In 1921, after the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky went back to Germany, where he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life.

October 14: Paul Klee (1879-1940)

One of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century, Paul Klee was a watercolorist, painter, and etcher of fantastic works, mostly small in scale. He went to Munich to study painting at the Academy under Stuck. He visited Italy to widen his knowledge of art, then lived in Bern, taking great interest in music as well as painting. In 1906 he settled in Munich, where he met Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Macke, and Marc and co-founded the Blue Rider movement with them in 1911. Klee moved to Weimar in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus, moving with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1926. His Pedagogical Sketchbook was published in 1925. He taught at Düsseldorf Academy until his dismissal by the Nazis in 1933, after which he returned to Bern.

October 28: Max Beckmann (1884-1950)

Known for probing the human condition in portraits, self-portraits, and enigmatic, allegorical tableaus, Beckmann emerged in Berlin in the early 1910s. He joined the medical corps during World War I, but was discharged after a nervous breakdown in 1915. His harrowing experience of war led him to incorporate strategies of distortion, angularity, and exaggerated color. He focused on urban themes, especially disaffection of postwar society, and often depicted life as a theater or circus in tightly compressed compositions. The Nazis removed more than 500 of his works from public collections in 1937 as degenerate.

November 18: Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Max Ernst studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, but soon abandoned this pursuit to concentrate on art. In 1911 Ernst became a friend of August Macke and joined the Rheinische Expressionisten group in Bonn. Despite military service throughout World War I, Ernst was able to continue painting and to exhibit in Berlin at Der Sturm. He returned to Cologne in 1918. The next year he founded the short-lived Cologne Dada movement with Johannes Theodor Baargeld; they were joined by Arp and others. He was involved in surrealist activities in the early 1920s with Paul Eluard and André Breton. In 1930 he collaborated with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel on the film L'Age d'Or. His first American show was held in New York in 1932. In 1936 Ernst was represented in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1939 he was interned in France as an enemy alien. Two years later Ernst fled to the United States with Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married in 1942. After their divorce he married Dorothea Tanning and in 1953 resettled in France.