Depictions of landscapes have run like a common thread through the entire history of art and were, sometimes more and sometimes less, a popular and esteemed motif. Although landscapes were already portrayed in antiquity and also in the Middle Ages, they merely served as settings and backgrounds for (mythical or biblical) scenes. It was only with the discovery of central perspective in the Renaissance that new possibilities emerged for creating the effect of pictorial depth in a landscape depiction. Consequently, landscape painting was not recognized as a genre in its own right until the 16th century, yet it was not initially accorded significant importance.

Landscape painting eventually gained prominence in the late 18th century, with the rise of Romanticism, though it often continued to have a religious significance. The late 19th century saw the emergence of early modern landscape painting, beginning with Impressionism. Due to the invention of portable paints and canvases, artists were no longer confined to a studio. As a result, landscape painting en plein air became popular, allowing artists to paint in the open air of nature at any moment of inspiration.

Towards the end of the century, artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne ushered in Modern Era with increasingly expressive works. Thereby, landscape painting became more colourful and abstract. Overall, over time, landscape painting evolved more and more from a highly realistic representation of a landscape to an individual portrayal shaped by the impressions of the artists. This transformation is evident in the 20th century Expressionists as well, for whom landscape depictions served not only as testing ground for new artistic means of expression but also reflected the artists' relationship with their environment and nature.

The depictions of nature provide insights into their mind-set and worldview, and in this way, they are capable of conveying something about the mentality and emotional state of the era in which they were created. The artists of Brücke (Bridge), centred around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), were closely connected to nature in their work, resulting in many of the works being created outdoors. During its creative years, in the summers of 1909, 1910 and 1911, the artists’ group worked at the Moritzburg ponds. Their stays there were primarily aimed at studying the nude in nature. In this subject, they saw a symbol of liberated life and art freed from all academic constraints.

When Ernst Ludwig Kirchner first arrived in Davos in 1917, he immediately incorporated the new environment into his repertoire of images. He devoted himself to the Davos landscape with its forests and mountains in all available techniques: sketches, drawings, watercolours, prints graphics, and paintings. Initially, in his nervous brushstroke, and later in his increasingly two-dimensional style, he captured excerpts of his surroundings on paper and canvas. This environment impressed him just as strongly as the urban life of Berlin had before. In 1921, he created the large-format painting “Berghirte im Herbst (Berghirte mit Ziegen” (Mountain Shepherd in Autumn (Mountain Shepherd with Goats)), in which he portrays yellow goats staggered on a mountain in the background, adorned by pink fields, under a deep blue sky with violet clouds - a prime example of expressive landscape representation.

Erich Heckel (1883-1970) remained equally fascinated by nature even after the dissolution of the Brücke Group. The depiction of mountains and dunes, the sea and rivers runs through the artist's oeuvre like a thread until the end of his life. He created a veritable orbis pictus of landscapes, mostly originating during his frequent travels. This is illustrated in the painting “Berghänge (Berghänge bei Corviglia” (Mountain Slopes (Mountain Slopes near Corviglia)) from 1957, which emerged on the occasion of his numerous stays in the Engadin region in the 1950s. He sketched and watercolored directly from nature. The paintings likely came to life later on the basis of these experiences in the studio. In his Engadin mountain landscapes, Erich Heckel was not concerned with heroic peaks and grandiose steep faces, rather, he focused on solitude and abandonment, the profound tranquility, and the reflections of weather in the landscape – the interplay of colours on rocks, slag heaps, alps, waters, and especially on ice and snow, which he knew better than anyone how to shape with the post-expressive tools of Modern Art.

Landscape depictions also enjoyed significant popularity among the other Brücke artists. Otto Mueller (1874-1930) created numerous nature scenes abundant with vegetation, such as “Dünenlandschaft 1” (Dunescape 1) or “Landschaft mit Baum und Wasser” (Landscape with Tree and Water), both of which were painted in 1920. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), on the other hand, drew his inspiration for landscapes from abroad: During World War I, he was initially stationed as a soldier and later as press officer in Kaunas, present-day Lithuania. In his letters back home, he expressed his enthusiasm for the landscape. He created several woodcuts that bear witness to this, including “Landscape (Russian Forest)” from 1918.

Hans Purrmann (1880-1966) found inspiration in Italy, who, after the war, between 1922 and 1926, repeatedly embarked on study trips there. Eventually, he took on the honorary role of directing the German Artists’ Foundation Villa Romana in Florence from 1935 on. In 1943, in Florence, Hans Purrmann painted the “Blick auf die Boboli-Gärten” (View of the Boboli Gardens): The flora in the foreground lies at the viewer’s feet, whose eye line is level with the wooded, hence dark-bluish shimmering, Apennines mountain ranges in the distance. These mountains almost blend with the slightly lighter blue of the sky and the veil-like clouds.

Lyonel Feininger's (1871-1956) “Notizen nach der Natur” (Notes from Nature), as he called them, can be seen as preliminary sketches on-site, the initial capture of what he saw - be it landscape or architecture, often accompanied by human figures. He created a large number of such small-format drawings on paper using pencil, charcoal, pen, or coloured chalks in a format that rarely exceeded 20 cm. They served as a treasure trove, as an archive for the artist, which he would revisit again and again, even after a long periods of time. Five such “Notes from Nature” are on display in the exhibition.

Christian Rohlfs (1849-1938) also paints what he sees - the landscape - during his annual stays in Ascona, which began in 1927. Throughout these visits, he primarily created large-format water-tempera works on paper depicting the surrounding landscape in various times of day and seasons, in different weather conditions and moods. In the aforementioned first year in Ascona, he produces “Mondnacht über Dorf und See (Ascona)” (Moonlit Night over Village and Lake (Ascona)), which captures the southern night over Lake Maggiore.

In George Grosz's (1893-1959) painting "Rocks at Bornholm, Denmark (Das Meer, die Felsen und der immerwährende Mond)” (Rocks at Bornholm, Denmark (The Sea, the Rocks and the Perpetual Moon)) (1940), however, there is a nostalgic landscape that the artist saw during his last trip to Europe in 1935 before the outbreak of World War II. This memory remained deeply etched in his mind for a long time. An inscription by Grosz on the back of a photograph of this painting reads: “In memory of the last time I saw Europe brooding and concocting horror and war, 1935.”

After World War II, the landscape depictions newly created in Expressionism, which definitely abandoned realistic-ideal models from art history and instead produced colour-intensive, two-dimensional and angular compositions, evolve into to an even more strongly non-representational visual language. From the 1940s onwards, Informal Art (“l'Art Informel”) even completely dissolves classical principles of form and composition, leading to the point of utter ‘formlessness’. In Eduard Bargheer's (1901-1979) brilliant oeuvre, painterly abstraction merges with the long-standing genre of landscape painting in the process, resulting in the “most comprehensive and compelling interpretation of the Mediterranean achieved by a Nordic artist.”[1] The decomposition into individual patterns, spanning the canvas in seemingly infinite variety, and the interplay of warm earth, green, and blue tones create a tension-filled reinterpretation of the landscape motif. Paintings such as “Vulkanische Landschaft mit Kap” (Volcanic Landscape with Cape) (1955) or “Morgenlandschaft” (Morning Landscape) (1968), despite their ‘loose’ forms, convey a concrete image: a southern attitude to life is always palpable.

In Francis Bott's (1904-1998) pictorial worlds, form takes a back seat to colour: in the large-scale oil work “Paysage bleu” (Blue Landscape) (1964), the landscape disappears into almost geometrically layered forms beneath a sky of radiant cobalt blue, also known as “Bott blue”. A similar pictorial motif is present in the smaller oil painting “Paysage” (Landscape) (1962): Here, the landscape occupies the lower third of the canvas, creating compositional tension with diverse tones of brown, ochre, red, and white, against the monochromatic, brownish ground or sky. These distinctive, abstract-expressive colours, developed by Bott from the 1950s onwards, rather stimulate one’s imagination of ‘landscape’ than prescribing a concrete image through specific concrete depictions.

In the exhibition, these abstract positions by Bargheer and Bott are juxtaposed with two works from the series “Détrompe-l'oeil. Hintergrundbilder” (Background Pictures) by Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri (*1930). In these, Spoerri, co-founder of Nouveau Réalisme and inventor of EAT-ART, subverts the illusionistic painting style known as trompe-l'oeil (English: "deceive the eye"), developed in the Renaissance. He attaches real objects to naturalistically painted acquired from flea markets. This result in works like “Détrompe-l'oeil. Hintergrundbilder. (mit zwei Lamafoeten aus Bronze)” (Détrompe l’oeil. Background pictures. (with two bronze llama foets)) (1988) and “Détrompe-l'oeil. Hintergrundbilder. Le Chemin de la Forèt” (Détrompe-l'oeil. Background pictures. Le Chemin de la Forèt) (1998), where perspective and three-dimensionality give rise to landscape paintings, yet actual animal skulls protrude from thrm - the optical illusion is undone, blending the real and the non-real.

Exclusively in our showroom: Darío Alvarez Basso & Paolo Serra

While the pictorial worlds created by Bargheer or Botts in the mid-20th century dissolve the object in the exhibition, Spanish artist Darío Alvarez Basso (*1966) sometimes turns back to clearer contours in his contemporary work. For this purpose, he employs a mixture of watercolour, varnish, and acrylic in the series of works "Orizzonte," created in 2004. In this composition, he creates different impressions of the horizon captured on paper. Sometimes this appears clear and distinct, as in the work "Orizzonte doble", while at other times, shrouded in a curtain of fog, it is only vaguely discernible, as illustrated by "Orizzonte de nebla". However, all of them reflect the artist's special flair for sensitively observing his surroundings. Thus, the apparent dividing line between earth and sky that constitutes the horizon - whether jagged, straight, or blurred depending on the landscape or weather - is mirrored in Basso's art, capturing its captivating atmosphere.

Simultaneously, in Paolo Serra's (*1946) evocative paintings, it becomes evident that the theme of ‘landscape’ in contemporary art can also be addressed in an abstract manner, symbolized solely through ‘light’. In the untitled series of works created in the 2000s, the artist places monochrome geometric squares and rectangles against a monochrome ground. Several hundred ultra-thin paint layers of lacquer, applied delicately one upon another with a brush, create such a spatial-perspective effect that the squares and rectangles appear to float above and below the surface. This depth effect is further enhanced by the subtly shimmering ground. In this network of wafer-thin layers of paint and light effects, the horizon line dissipates - what remains, is the infinity of light, the rays of the sun that give rise to nature and landscape in the first place.

We dedicate an exclusive showroom in Riehen to both contemporary artists, Basso and Serra.

As essential as light is for the formation of landscape, the forces of nature are equally significant for it. With the positions by Basso, who references the landscape through its horizon line, and Serra, who reduces the landscape to its light, the exhibition offers another contemporary perspective on the theme through Jürgen Brodwolf (*1932). With his “Fels” (Rock) series (2005), the Swiss artist succeeds in capturing a striking moment for humanity in nature. In his bronze sculpture “Figur vor Felskopf” (Figure in Front of Rocky Knoll), the body of solid rock, steeply protruding from its environment due to erosion and weathering, meets the body of a human being. In a slightly stooped, hesitant, or even protection-seeking posture, the person approaches the scenically formidable and superior counterpart. The human being is crafted entirely in the artist's signature ‘tube figure’ style, a discovery in the studio that has accompanied Brodwolf artistic journey since the 1950s. In their juxtaposition, human and rocky knoll are united in a certain way. Simultaneously, the figures, worked in two separate bronzes, also suggest a possible distance: the human thus appears in an ambiguous relationship with nature, seeking its proximity yet also maintaining a distance from it.

In the exhibition “EXPRESSIVE! Landscape in Modern Art”, we aim to explore these diverse observations and interpretations of the theme of ‘landscape’ from the past century of art history up to the present day. Our exclusive showroom, running in parallel with the exhibition, also engages with this theme rich in tradition, through contemporary artistic positions, offering an exciting view to the here and now. We cordially invite you to discover surprisingly new perspectives on the environment around us and to explore the varied artistic landscape worlds.

Katharina Schindler (Sagel) & Susanne Kirchner
(translated by Uli Nickel)

   [1] Wolfgang Henze, Eduard Bargheer. Leben und Werk, Galleria Henze – Campione d’Italia, 1979. Note: Eduard Bargheer was born in Hamburg in 1901, hence the expression ‘Nordic artist’, p. 13.