ART REVIEW : The German Expressionist View of Man in Nature

In the early 1800s, German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich expressed the overpowering feeling of nature by painting a tiny figure gazing out to sea. A century later, weary of the stultifying proprieties of bourgeois culture, the German Expressionists took a bolder, often fiercer tack.

They exaggerated the contours and contrasts of the world around them to synchronize with their own intense sensibilities, recreating nature as a mysterious dream world or a monster organism driven by harsh rhythms.

At the County Museum of Art (to Sept. 3), “German Expressionism and Nature,” drawn from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, offers a sampling of 80 prints and drawings by major and lesser-known artists, grouped in categories such as “Nature as Paradise” and “Creation and Destruction.”

Although this arrangement makes the development of the movement as a whole harder to grasp--as well as downplaying the artists’ affiliations with groups like Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Der Blauer Reiter (The Blue Rider)--it does allow the art itself to take center stage.

The movement’s formal qualities were influenced by such diverse sources as medieval woodcuts, sculpture from the South Sea Islands, the graphic work of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch and the decorative qualities of Jugendstil, the German version of Art Nouveau. Its intellectual basis was rooted in such ideas as poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s comment that art should be “almost hostile . . . to give our existence new meaning.” And its emotional expression was as individual as the personalities of the artists themselves.

If some of these images are charged with passion--like Ernst Barlach’s lithograph, “Star Dance,” in which a gaunt, ecstatic figure hugs himself beneath a huge star-filled sky--others simmer on a low flame. In Max Beckmann’s drypoint, “Main River Landscape,” scroll-like clouds and an unusual format emphasizing the white of the paper create a flat, diagrammatic effect almost like a medieval map.

Some of the most striking images in the exhibit are the work of artists whose names are no longer familiar. Alfred Hanf turned the natural world of “Country Road” into a nervous jangle of swelling and tapering lines that almost swallow up the moon and a baying dog. Gustav Wolf’s lithograph, “The Fourth Day,” conjures up the primal world of Creation, with multiple suns like cogs of machinery and exploding galaxies.

Even the most fervent of these visions, however, is much smaller and paler than the kind of massively scaled, boldly outspoken art we are used to looking at today. A certain degree of patience helps smooth the transition between Now and Then, and so does a degree of empathy with an era more interested in the psyche than the body beautiful.