In German regions the arts flourished until religious upheavals and iconoclastic purges of religious images took a toll at mid-century. The German cities had strong business and trade interests and their merchants and bankers accumulated self-made, rather than inherited wealth. They ordered portraits of themselves and fine furnishings for their large, comfortable houses. Entrepreneurial artists, like Albrecht Durer, became major commercial successes. (Stokstad 709)

   “Albrecht Dürer is the greatest exponent of Northern European Renaissance art. While an important painter, in his own day Dürer was renowned foremost for his graphic works. Artists across Europe admired and copied Dürer's innovative and powerful prints, ranging from religious and mythological scenes, to maps and exotic animals.

Technically, Dürer's prints are exemplary for their detail and precision. The son of a goldsmith, Dürer was trained as a metalworker at a young age. He applied the same meticulous, exacting methods required in this delicate work to his woodcuts and engravings, notably the Four Horsemen of his Apocalypse series (1498), and his Knight, Death and Devil (1513).

Dürer's training also involved travel and study abroad. He went to Italy in 1494, and returned again in 1505-6. Contact with Italian painters resonated deeply in his art. Influenced by Venetian artists, who were renowned for the richness of their palette, Dürer placed greater importance on colour in his paintings. His Feast of the Rose Garlands (1506), removed any doubt that, as well as a master of prints, he was an accomplished painter.

Dürer was also a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci. He was intrigued by the Italian master's studies of the human figure, and after 1506 applied and adapted Leonardo's proportions to his own figures, as is evident in his drawings. Later in his life, in the 1520's, he illustrated and wrote theoretical treatises instructing artists in perspective and proportion.

Dürer was a humanist and a creator. His awareness of his own role as an artist is apparent in his frontal, Christ-like Self Portrait, 1500, just one of many self portraits that he painted in his career. More than simply producing works for his own time, Dürer saw his fame and his contribution as enduring, and as part of history.”

  - T.L. Ponich (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/durer_albrecht.html)

“Striking a rare balance between formal elegance and expressive strength, the sculpture of Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460–1531) stands solidly anchored in the late Gothic tradition while also reflecting emerging humanist concerns. This international loan exhibition brings together many of the sculptor's finest works from throughout his career, including elements from altarpieces, cult figures, objects of private devotion, models, and sculpture with a secular function. Riemenschneider, active in Würzburg from about 1483 until 1531, was one of the first sculptors to abandon *polychromy on occasion, making a conscious aesthetic decision to leave visible his favored material, limewood. Here on display are examples of both his monochrome and his polychrome wood sculptures, as well as exquisite works in alabaster and sandstone. The inclusion of a few outstanding works by Riemenschneider's most important predecessors and contemporaries—such as Niclaus Gerhaert von Leiden, Michel Erhart, and Veit Stoss—allows his achievement to be viewed in its proper context.”(http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/tilmanintro.shtm) *pol·y·chro·my  (pl-krm) n. The use of many colors in decoration, especially in architecture and sculpture.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Prayer was the principal source of solace and relief to the ill before the advent of modern medicine. About 1505, the Strasbourg sculptor Nikolaus Hagenauer (active 1493-1530s) carved an alter piece for the Abbey Saint Anthony in Isenheim Near Colmar . Matthias Grunewald is best known today for painting the wings of the ISENHEIM ALTARPIECE, built to protect the shrine carved by Nikolaus Hagenauer. (Stokstad 711)

Members of Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) harbored more spiritual intentions that led one member to member to produce some of the first completely abstract paintings. The group was named for a popular image of blue knight, the Saint George on the city emblem of Moscow, which many believed would be the worlds capital during Christ’s 1,000 year-year reign on earth following the Apocalypse prophesied by Saint John. The Blue Rider formed in Munich around the painters Vasily Kadinsky (1866 – 1944), a Russian from Moscow, and Franz Marc (1880 – 1916), a native of Munich, who both considered blue the color of spirituality. (Stokstad 1073)

In Self-Portrait Nude, the artist stares at the viewer with an anguished expression, his emaciated body stretched into an uncomfortable pose. The absent right hand suggests amputation, and the unarticulated genital region, castration. The missing body parts have been interpreted as the artist’s symbolic self-punishment for indulgence in masturbation, then commonly believed to lead to insanity. Schiele’s father had suffered from untreated syphilis and died insane when Egon was fourteen, leaving his son with an abiding link between sex, suffering, and death. (Stokstad 1073)

“Prominent in German Expressionist art was Die Brucke (“The Bridge”), which formed in Dresden in 1905 when four architecture students – Fritz Bleyl (1880 – 1938), Erich Heckel (1883 – 1970), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938), and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884 – 1976) – decided to devote themselves to painting and to form an exhibiting group.”(Stokstad1070)

“Bauhaus, famous German school of design that had inestimable influence on modern architecture, the industrial and graphic arts, and theater design. It was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar as a merger of an art academy and an arts and crafts school. The Bauhaus was based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that art should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. It also depended on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. Thus, classes were offered in crafts, typography, and commercial and industrial design, as well as in sculpture, painting, and architecture. The Bauhaus style, later also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornament and ostentatious facades and by harmony between function and the artistic and technical means employed. In 1925 the Bauhaus was moved into a group of starkly rectangular glass and concrete buildings in Dessau especially designed for it by Gropius. In Dessau the Bauhaus style became more strictly functional with greater emphasis on showing the beauty and suitability of basic, unadorned materials. Other outstanding architects and artists on the staff of the Bauhaus included the Swiss painter Paul Klee, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, the Hungarian painter and designer László Moholy-Nagy (who founded the Chicago Institute of Design on the principles of the Bauhaus), the American painter Lyonel Feininger, and the German painter Oskar Schlemmer. In 1930 the Bauhaus came under the direction of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who moved it to Berlin in 1932. By 1933, when the school was closed by the Nazis, its principles and work were known worldwide. Many of its faculty immigrated to the United States, where the Bauhaus teachings came to dominate art and architecture for decades.“ (http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761553605/Bauhaus.html)

“Disgust with the conflict (World War I) would eventually spring up on many fronts, but the first artistic movement to react against the slaughter and its moral quandaries was Dada. If the goal of Modern art was questioning and overthrowing the traditions of art, the Dadaists went further and questioned art itself.”(Stokstad 1088)

“Born 1886 in Pirmasens, Hugo Ball studied German literature, philosophy, and history at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg (1906-1907). In 1910, he moved to Berlin in order to become an actor and collaborated with Max Reinhardt and worked as a director and stage manager for various theater companies in Berlin, Plauen, and Munich. He also started writing, contributing to the expressionist journals Die Neue Kunst and Die Aktion, both of which, in style and in content, anticipated the format of later Dada journals. Soon after the outbreak of World War I he and Emmy Hennings, a cabaret singer whom he had met in Munich and whom he would marry in 1920, emigrated to Zurich, Switzerland. In February 1916 he founded the 'Cabaret Voltaire' in the Spiegelgasse. There he met with Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and later Richard Huelsenbeck and Walter Serner. In July 1916 Ball left the Dada circle in Zurich in order to recuperate in the Swiss countryside. He returned in January 1917 to help organize Galerie Dada, an exhibition space that opened in March 1917. Events at the Galerie included lectures, performances, dances, weekend soirées, and tours of the exhibitions. Although Ball supported the educative goals of the Galerie, he was at odds with Tzara over Tzara's ambition to make Dada into an international movement with a systematic doctrine. He left Zurich in May 1917 and did not again actively participate in Dada activities. Hugo Ball died in Sant' Abbondio, Switzerland, 14 September 1927. (http://www.dada-companion.com/ball/)

In summer 1937, Joseph Goebbels’ degenerate art commission canvassed Germany, searching public and private collections. Propaganda office officials seized the works of Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, Erich Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Käthe Kollwitz, among others. Especially hard hit was the modern art division of the Berlin National Gallery, which lost 136 paintings, 28 sculptures, and 324 drawings.Goebbels first visited the warehouse on November 4, 1937. The painter Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reich Chamber of Artists, and architect Albert Speer accompanied him. In his diary, Goebbels wrote, “Very few borderline cases. The rest is such dreck that a three hour visit makes one sick.”In order to convince Hitler to legalize the confiscations that had already taken place, Goebbels gave him a tour of the warehouse on January 13, 1938. “No picture was acceptable,” wrote Goebbels in his diary. “Führer also wants no compensation paid to the owners. We will exchange a few of the works outside of Germany for real masterpieces.” On May 31, 1938, the seizure without compensation of degenerate art was legalized ex post facto. At the same time, avant-garde artists living in Germany were forbidden to paint. Franz Hofmann, the director of fine art and art critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, recommended that “the worthless, unsalable remainder be dumped in a trash heap and symbolically burned,” Goebbels wrote. “I should also deliver a peppery eulogy.” But Goebbels reserved many works for an “instructional” and propaganda exhibit, “Degenerate Art,” which traveled to large German and Austrian cities. From February 26th to May 8th, 1938, the works were on display in Berlin, at the “Haus der Kunst,” Königsplatz 4.The exhibit catalogue is a rarity today. It disparaged the anti-war pictures of Otto Dix as “defense-sabotage.” A painting by a schizophrenic in a mental hospital “looks more human than any concoction of Paul Klee.” A painting by Kurt Schwitters was “the height of stupidity or impudence--or both.” But one German commented, “the Nazis, in spite of themselves, gave us the chance to become acquainted with the crème of modern art, all in one place.”(http://stevenlehrer.com/degenerate_art.htm) 

One of the first Postmodern movements to rise in the late 1970s was Neo-Expressionism, a return to the Expressionist styles in which the artist tries to render his or her inner self more than the outward appearance of the subject matter at hand. In Germany, the revival of Expressionism, took on political connotations because the work of the original Expressionist had been labeled degenerate and banned by the Nazis during the 1930s. The German Neo-Expressionist Anselm Kiefer was born in final weeks of World war II, and his work he has sought to come to grips with country’s Nazi past – “to understand the madness.”(Stokstad 1175)

Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History –Volume Two. 3rd Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008.

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