New Sources of Inspiration

Narrator: The artists lined up like matchstick men behind the girl in the yellow-black jersey recall the angular figurative carvings on the wooden beam from a house in the Palau Islands in Dresden’s Ethnological Museum, which Max Pechstein and his colleagues are known to have observed when they visited the reopened Oceania Room in 1910.
(…)
In their quest for new motifs, the artists looked not only to the leading artists of their time (and sometimes to the Old Masters of art history), but frequently to everyday and ritual objects from outside Europe, many of which had been acquired by European dealers, collectors, and museums through colonial channels.
 
Without this input, the work of Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Nolde would not have evolved as quickly as it clearly did in the years from 1909 onwards. Kirchner’s claim in 1925 that “his own form was and had to be quite different from that of these exotic objects” was one of his many attempts at self-fashioning, designed to project the ideal of an autonomous artist whose work derived entirely from its own essence. In reality, visits to the ethnographic museums in Dresden and Berlin had provided the Brücke artists with fresh material for building their simplified, expressive idiom, as well as for designing their studios and enriching their paintings.
 
This stimulus from “foreign” forms and motifs enabled them to create works that were later subsumed in art history under the rather vague concept of “primitivism”.
 
How should we respond to these artistic processes of appropriation and transformation today? When these artists were alive, the debate focused on accusations of imitation and eclecticism, whereas critique today factors in the role of the artist in the context of Germany’s colonial history. Did a formal, aesthetic approach to this art and the celebration of “expression” with no awareness of origins perhaps contribute to colonial amnesia?