With Graphic Intent

With highlights from the Courtauld’s collection of German and Austrian modernist works on paper and some noteworthy loans, this is a must-see exhibition for anyone interested in early modernist expressionism and the graphic arts

Oskar Kokoschka, The Dreaming Youths (title page; The Sleeping Girl), 1907 (detail). One of eight colour lithographs, 24 x 29.3 cm.

Project Space, Floor 2, Courtauld Gallery, London
1 March – 22 June 2025

by BRONAĊ FERRAN

The Project Space at the Courtauld is one of the smallest of its galleries but often one of its most dynamic and exploratory. I am here to see the latest display, which features 10 (male) artists and 16 works focusing on a variety of approaches to graphic art, primarily within the context of German and Austrian modernism, in the opening decades of the last century. (Entrance is free if you have a ticket for another exhibition at the Courtauld.)

Co-conceived by the Courtauld’s Emily Christensen and her colleague Niccola Shearman, with curatorial input from Rachel Sloan, the vision for the exhibition is to show us the “artists’ commitment to using the inherent material properties of the graphic arts – the jagged edges of cuts into woodblocks or the visceral indentations of pens pressed repeatedly into paper” as a means to communicate often complex topics with which “they were wrestling”. We are invited, too, to see how such interventions challenge “inherited social and class norms, openly expressing anxieties around their threatened and unstable masculinity, and pushing at the very boundaries of what constituted art”.¹

Georg Baselitz, Untitled (from the Whip Woman series), 1964. Graphite on paper, 62.5 x 48.6 cm.

The curatorial reach of the exhibition also pushes its own limits, including in the display an ink-drawing made by the purist Wassily Kandinsky, when he was in Russia in 1916, as well as a graphite, sexually graphic, work on paper by Georg Baselitz from 1964. The Baselitz work, which is in effect the last work we discover – as we move through the first room of the display, to the second – comes from a series the artist called Whip Woman. Those who know their Nietzsche, a figurehead for the most agonistic aspects of German expressionism, may see here an echo from his infamous line in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where “a little old woman” remarks to Zarathustra: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”² Meanwhile, in the second room of the exhibition we also see a curatorial heading, The Cultural Condition of Women along with a very leading question: “Whose battle?”

Cover of Der Sturm, July 1910, designed by the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

Also prominent within the same section is the front cover of the July 1910 issue of the Berlin-based magazine Der Sturm (The Assault), designed by the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was known by his Viennese contemporaries as the Wild One. Having written a provocatively blasphemous play, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), that led to his banishment from Viennese society, the work found another life in a Berlin theatre as well as on the cover of Der Sturm, supported by the magazine’s founder Herwarth Walden. Indeed, as a powerful depiction of transgression, Kokoschka’s cover image still has a shock value that intensifies on closer looking, not least in recognising how he is using various hatching markings on the male and female figures, who represent the knife-wielding Son of God and his “femme fatale” Mother (who eventually murders her son). As the MoMA website comments, the two “nude bodies are covered in expressive, netlike patterns of tattoos – at the time, signifiers of primitivism, criminality and degeneracy”.³

Oskar Kokoschka, The Dreaming Youths (title page; The girl Li and I), 1907. One of eight colour lithographs, 24 x 29.3 cm.

Much of Kokoschka’s work of the same period is resonant of the strong influence of the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, first published in 1900. We can feel this presence also in the drawings and text that Kokoschka developed for the 1907 book The Dreaming Youths, which he was commissioned to make for children. Kokoschka was certainly skilled in the graphic arts, binding and designing this work as well as creating its eight lithographs. But what he produced, as the four lithographed sheets presented within this exhibition demonstrate, was something unexpected. As the curators put it, the “lyrical visions” of the images and accompanying text “break into a visceral eroticism”.

They also draw our attention to the influence of the writer Karl Kraus, whom they refer to as “deeply influential on Viennese artists” and a “torchbearer” who “criticised the hypocrisy” of Austrian society, and yet was “outright misogynistic”. This is also a critique they hint at in terms of another work shown in this section, this time by Otto Dix. Dix is best known for his leading role in the sharply focused Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement that became a dominant force of critique with respect to German society in the 1920s and was perceived as a stringent counterpoint to the excesses and vagaries of expressionism. But Dix was in many ways a bridge figure, the complexity of which cannot readily be conveyed by the showing of only one work in this exhibition. It is entitled Lament and, although generally dated 1915 (when Dix was either in, or on his way to, the trenches as a soldier), the curators suggest it may be from two years earlier.

Otto Dix, Lament, 1915 (or 1913?). Pen and black ink with brush on paper, 31.6 x 22.2 cm.

It was made with pen and black ink with brush on paper and depicts a group of intertwined naked female figures with drooping breasts. The work is redolent of late symbolism, being heavily mournful and mythological in its aspect. Again, it opens itself up to Freudian interpretation, with respect to recognition of the suppression of sexual impulses that are given a degree of liberation through the deep scoring of marks on paper.

What this part of the exhibition underlines is how artists identifying with the concept of German expressionism were activating extreme acts of graphic expression as techniques by which they might break free from individual and societal repression, sublimation and suppression. Although this may seem almost stereotypical to contemporary eyes and ears, schooled in concepts of liberation through experimentalist dismantling, viewing the emergence of this antagonistic attitude that grew collectively stronger through heightened individualist expression, becomes here a rather revelatory experience. We are invited to consider how artists began wielding pens and brushes like extensions of their inner angst, while at the same time, what sometimes erupted to the surface was an expressive violence against the opposite sex.

While the question of “whose battle?” in this second room appears wholly gender-focused, it takes on a more multiple set of resonances within the opening room of the exhibition, where in contrast to the wildness of Kokoschka in particular we return to works a little more sober, not least the aforementioned drawing made in Russia in 1915 by Kandinsky, using black ink and brush on paper. Having left Russia to study art in Munich in 1896, he co-founded the group Der Blaue Reiter in 1911 along with artist friends including Franz Marc (who was killed in the first world war) and his then partner, the artist Gabriele Münter. 

Despite these close associations and his later connection to the Bauhaus school, Kandinsky described his soul as being Russian. Something of this is transmitted within this work, that folds into graphic space, on cheap, perforated-edged paper, a sense of a gravity of imminence and poetic foreshadowing in its depth of blackness, of the turbulence of the October Revolution that followed soon after. He makes this sense of intimation visible entirely by use of different tonalities of ink and by the scattering of elements in non-linear configurations across the materiality of the paper, the thin texture of which conveys the reality of limited resources for art and drawing within the specific context and location. Drawing on his capacity for non-figurative communication at an advanced level, the work becomes a capturing of the energy of a pre-revolutionary moment. In this sense, the specific graphic constraints speak loudly in their poverty rather than their excess.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes from the portfolio 9 Woodcuts by Schmidt-Rottluff, 1918. Woodcut, 53.3 x 70.5 cm. Private collection.

The work finds relational congruence in being sited here alongside another black pen and ink drawing of a similar size and scale, but redolent of a highly contrasting mood and energy, made by Kandinsky’s friend and colleague, Paul Klee. Entitled Children and Crows, dated 1932, it is late with respect to the earlier rise and decline of an expressionist era. But characteristically we see a rhythmical flow of dark lines into figures and forms, the contours of which overlap and become entangled. Bearing in mind the date of this title, it seems important to question which are the children and which are the crows and are they good or bad omens?

A further highlight of this room is the display of an original “key woodblock”, which Kandinsky cut into to create the forms that became his 1911 colour woodcut entitled Lyrisches (Lyrical). We learn from the accompanying commentary how pleased Kandinsky was with what he had created, writing on 11 July to Münter to say: “The contour plate is finished and it is very good.”  His expressiveness in cutting into the wood speaks for itself as we stare through the glass at the preserved lines and angles that depict a rider on a horse in a figurative sense, as well as pointing metaphorically to the figure of the artist who was moving at exactly the same time towards lyrical abstraction. The block, which is part of a private collection in London, has been loaned especially for this exhibition.

Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled, 1916. Brush and black ink on paper, 15.8 x 54.8 cm. Gift by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard Karshan, 2020.

The work’s connection to London goes back even further. Kandinsky exhibited material in the city, including a series of woodcuts, from 1908-14, as part of the Allied Artists Association, founded in 1908 by Frank Rutter (then Director of Leeds Art Gallery). As Frances Guy has written: “In the 1911 exhibition, Kandinsky showed a selection of improvisations and compositions, some woodcuts and the proofs for Sounds”, the latter being a book of his prose poems accompanied by illustrations, including Lyrisches, which was published in limited edition in Munich by Verlag Piper in 1912.⁴

Indeed, elsewhere in the first room, among a series of portraits of people connected with printing and publishing, we can see a fine woodcut by Peter Trumm, featuring Reinhard Piper, the visionary publisher behind Verlag Piper. He was responsible not only for Sounds, but also for Kandinsky’s most famous text, On the Spiritual in Art (1911), and then for the foundational Der Blaue Reiter Almanac in the following year.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dr. Ernst Gosebruch, 1915. Woodcut, 48.6 x 35 cm. Private collection.

In another example, from 1922, we are shown the figure of Walter Künzel, a printer who worked closely on etchings and woodcuts with the artist Conrad Felixmüller, who spent much time documenting the lives of workers in the industrial Ruhr valley. Everything about this portrait, made with graphite on paper, speaks to the belief that Felixmüller also held, in the potential of print-making to advance the cause of social democracy. Two other woodcuts, one a portrait of Dr Ernst Gosebruch by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (c1915), show us the expressive range of what was being produced using traditional methods. Challenging us to recognise the backstory behind what we might see on the graphic surface, this is a highly stimulating exhibition with much of relevance to the present moment.

References
1. All quotations in the text, other than when directly noted, are from the curatorial statement or wall-texts.
2. This is a citation from Robert C. Holub, Friedrich Nietzsche, New York, Twayne Publishers, 1995, 90
3. See here on the website of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art.
4. Frances Guy, ‘Dissonances’, Eye-Music, Kandinsky, Klee and All That Jazz. Edited by Frances Guy, Simon Shaw-Miller and Michael Tucker, published by Pallant House, Chichester, 2007, pp82-84.

• To coincide with the exhibition, a panel discussion, With Graphic Intent: German and Austrian modernist works on paper, with curators Niccola Shearman and Emily Christensen, with Dorothy Price, Anne Grasselli, Bernadette Reinhold, and Cat Hepburn, will take place on 24 April at the Courtauld’s Vernon Square campus.