Post-expressionism

Post-expressionism is a name coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 for the European painting that followed Expressionism: artists who kept its intensity but refused its agitation, turning instead to stillness, clarity and the visible world. Roh introduced it in his book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus, treating 'post-expressionism' and 'magic realism' as one thing - a cool, sharply focused realism charged with strangeness. In the same year the curator Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub's exhibition 'New Objectivity' charted overlapping ground within German art, and later critics have separated the magic realist strand from that show's harsher verists. The term thus names a tendency rather than a program: a postwar return to order in which ordinary objects and figures appear preternaturally clear and quietly unsettling.

Defining characteristics

• Cool, even light and smooth, finished surfaces after Expressionist agitation
• Sharp focus and meticulous detail rendering ordinary objects and figures
• Still, static, dreamlike clarity - the everyday made strange
• Return to figuration and objective description
• Sober, controlled color instead of an emotive palette
• A calm tension between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the uncanny

Key figures

• Franz Roh (1890-1965) — German art critic who coined the term in his 1925 book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus
• Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub (1884-1963) — Curator whose 1925 'New Objectivity' exhibition mapped the same ground in German art
• Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938) — German painter, the magic realist wing of New Objectivity's cool figuration

Sources

• Post-expressionism - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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