American Figurative Expressionism

American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it is human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure.

The term "Figurative Expressionism" arose as a counter-distinction to "Abstract Expressionism." Like German Expressionism, the American movement addresses issues at the heart of the expressionist sensibility, such as personal and group identity in the modern world, the role of the artist as a witness to issues such as violence and corruption, and the nature of the creative process and its implications. These factors speak to the movement's strong association with the emotional expression of the artist's interior vision, with the kinds of emphatic brushstrokes and bold color found in paintings like Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night and Edvard Munch's The Scream that have influenced generations of practitioners. They also speak to the rejection of the outward-facing "realism" of Impressionism, and tacitly suggest the influence of Symbolism on the movement, which sees meaning in line, form, shape and color.

The Boston origins of the American movement date to a "wave of German and European-Jewish immigrants" in the 1930s and their "affinities to the contemporary German strain of figurative painting ... in artists like Otto Dix (1891–1969), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), and Emil Nolde (1867–1956), both in style and in subject matter," art historian Adam Zucker writes. Calling Humanism the defining ideal of the American movement, Zucker says it was "inspired largely by political and/or social issues and conflicts," much as many of the practitioners of "mid-20th century art, including Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, took stances against war or wars, both on and off the canvas.

Indeed, many Boston artists had links to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston or the Boris Mirski Gallery where painters like Karl Zerbe (1903–1972), Hyman Bloom (1913–2009), Jack Levine (1915–2010), David Aronson (b. 1923) studied, taught, exhibited and ultimately grew into activists after "openly challenging a statement issued by the Boston Institute of Modern Art under the heading ‘Modern Art and the American Public.'" Concerned that Boston's Brahmin museums would never support them, they founded the New England Chapter of Artists Equity to fight for their rights and organized the Boston Arts Festival to make art more democratic.

Their ongoing work and modernist dialogues envisioned art "as a narrative that unfolded through the incorporation of figures and landscapes into allegories drawn ... from traditional or imagined subject matter, fueled by the artists’ experiences and spirituality. Their themes tended toward "scenes and images in which they expressed profound emotions, horrors and fantasies in a largely allegorical manner. Spiritual and fantastical scenes were thus common, and depictions of sublime religious displays, political satire, and treatments of the theme of human mortality ... all contributed to the progression of figurative painting and to the evolving definition of modern humanist art."

The Expressionist movement was born of early 20th-century artists James Ensor, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. But French, German and Russo-German groups working between 1905 and 1920 helped develop it. The French group, concentrating on the painterly aspects of their work, particularly color, was classified as Fauvist ("wild beasts"), and Henri Matisse is considered a key practitioner. The Dresden-based strain was known as Die Brücke, referring to the group's desire to "bridge" the past. The self-taught Die Brücke had a strong interest in primitivism, like the Fauvists, but their color choices were in a less natural, higher key than those of the French, and their streetscapes were edgy. Their content was also sometimes sexual, in the spirit of the alienation they were expressing in woodcuts and sculpture. The final group, Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), based in Munich, was largely of Russian nationality, and included, most famously, Wassily Kandinsky. This group was considerably more abstract in orientation, rejecting the more realistic approach of Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter painting, which lent the group its name.

The art historian Judith Bookbinder established Boston Figurative Expressionism as an integral part of American modernism bracketing the Second World War, saying "[It] expressed the anxiety of the modern age with the particular accent of the city." The early members of the Boston Expressionist group were immigrants, or children of immigrants, from Central and Eastern Europe. Many were Jewish, and some had Germanic backgrounds.

Thus, German Expressionists like Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Oskar Kokoschka were a strong influence on the Boston painters, as was German-born painter Karl Zerbe who taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one of two axes central to the formation of Boston Expressionism, along with the modernist Boris Mirski Gallery. In the 1930s, during its early development, the movement attracted only a small group of supporters and, during that period, many German emigres, critics and scholars also tried to deny all connections to art movements associated in any way with Germany. But by the 1940s, Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine, both of whom had begun as Works Progress Administration painters, had already made a mark. In 2006, Danforth Museum of Art Director Katherine French said, "There was a period of about six months when Hyman Bloom was the most important painter in the world, and probably a period of about five years when he was the most important painter in America." Praised by Time magazine while having scarcely sold a picture he was called "the first abstract expressionist" by New Yorkers Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Back in Boston, he was later considered to be one of the pioneers of Boston Expressionism, a movement that thrived throughout the 1950s, and is still influential today.