Cubo-Expressionism
Cubo-Expressionism is the critical label for painting that welds Cubist construction to Expressionist feeling: the picture is built from angular, geometric facets, but loaded with saturated color and emotional charge. It was never an organized movement - no group, no manifesto - but a tendency named in Central European art writing of the 1920s and later applied to modernists in Romania, the Netherlands, and Brazil. WikiArt catalogues under the name painters such as Lasar Segall, Else Berg, and Iosif Iser, whose figures and still lifes are chopped into planes yet burn with color. The label overlaps with Cubo-Futurism and with the various national Cubisms, and its works are best understood as interwar modernism's middle ground between pure structure and pure feeling.
Defining characteristics
- Angular, geometric facets and planar fragmentation borrowed from Cubist construction
- Saturated, often non-naturalistic color carrying the emotional charge of Expressionism
- Figures and still lifes built from intersecting planes rather than modelled volumes
- Tense, tilted compositions and distorted proportions that keep the image unsettled
- Rougher, hand-worked surfaces than studio Cubism, with brushwork left visible
Key figures
- Lasar Segall (1891-1957) — Lithuanian-born painter, later a Brazilian modernist, whose Am Spiegel (1923) fuses Cubist planes with Expressionist color
- Else Berg (1877-1942) — German-born Dutch painter of the Bergense School whose portraits shatter figures into colored facets
- Iosif Iser (1881-1958) — Romanian painter and graphic artist known for angular, color-driven figures from Dobruja
Example works
- Am Spiegel — Lasar Segall (1923)
- Girl in Yugoslavia — Else Berg (1926)
Sources
- Cubo-Expressionism - WikiArt institution