#expressionism

He spent the last stretch of his career painting the same face over and over — hundreds of versions, from what I've read, each one flatter and more stripped back than the one before it.

Apparently he painted this same setup - seated, facing forward, hands folded - close to 200 times, and barely ever named who he was painting. Supposedly one of the other versions is so similar it's been mistaken for the same sitter.

By 1913 Kandinsky had mostly let go of recognizable scenes, chasing what he called the "inner sound" of color instead.

This came from a string of coastal landscapes painted while recovering from a breakdown — a much quieter stretch than the work he's known for.

This print was meant for an illustrated Bible — Marc was working through the Genesis story with animals standing in for it. The other one in the set showed horses; museum notes call this one the more menacing of the two.

The name everyone calls this by wasn't his — someone else stuck it on later, and he'd used a much gentler title himself. He painted the same two people over and over, six goes at it in about two years, from what I can find.

He kept African and Pacific carvings around his studio and painted them into scenes like this one — the bowl in the title is one of them.

This was, apparently, based on a real walk — he wrote later about feeling something like a scream pass through nature, and said the sky here is close to how he actually remembered the color that evening.

This started off a run of tree paintings he kept at for years — each one taking a bit more out, according to Wikipedia, until the trees eventually turned into straight lines and blocks and stopped being trees at all.

Wikipedia says he spent his summers in a small Bavarian town, painting it over and over and brighter each time — and a couple of years after this he gave up painting recognisable things altogether.

This is from just before he gave up recognisable subjects altogether — a year or two on, he was painting pictures of nothing in particular and arguing they could work on you the way music does.

This came near the end of his life — the 1918 flu got him at twenty-eight, a few days after it got his wife. Early on he'd done a stretch in jail over drawings somebody decided were indecent, and from what I can find that hung over him for years afterwards.

According to Wikipedia he spent the rest of his life painting heads — hundreds of them, getting simpler and simpler until they were barely faces at all. This one's from near the start of all that.

He was part of a group in Dresden that called itself the Bridge — apparently they shared a studio, painted their friends fast and cheap, and wanted nothing to do with the polite art of the day. It's said the group fell apart a year or so after this, partly over a history of it he wrote himself.

They say Kirchner and his Die Brücke friends thought cheap, loud entertainment — circuses, wrestling matches, variety halls — was more honest than anything on a proper stage.

They say Corinth kept turning the brush on himself after a stroke nearly killed him in 1911, and this is one of the last self-portraits from near the end of his life.

Wikipedia puts him with a group of Munich painters who reckoned a picture could work the way music does — colour doing the carrying, the scene barely hanging on. Apparently this comes from the stretch of years when the nameable things were on their way out of his pictures for good. Not long after, there was nothing left in them to point at.

Tthe model was apparently his own dog — a big white shepherd — and some say it's the same dog painted twice. A couple of years later he was the man doing blue horses and yellow cows; this is just before all that started.

This was, apparently, based on a real walk — he wrote later about feeling something like a scream pass through nature, and said the sky here is close to how he actually remembered the color that evening.

It's paper rather than canvas — watercolour and crayon worked over gouache, which is part of why so much of it stays bare. The woman is generally taken to be his wife, a couple of years into a marriage he'd made, from what I've read, at least partly for the respectability of it. He drew her again and again.