Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints

Organized by the Syracuse University Art Collection, this exhibition presented fifty woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings by many of the seminal German artists of the early twentieth century, including Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and Käthe Kollwitz. These painters and printmakers experimented with the expressive potential of their print mediums and often emphasized emotional lyricism as well as the real-life turmoil of a period quickly transformed by industrialism and world war. By rendering brittle lines into copper, gouging bold shapes into wood, or drawing quick marks onto plate or stone, they responded in their styles and subjects to a new, fast-paced, and increasingly materialistic age. The Blaue Reiter, Die Brücke, and Neue Sachlichkeit are all represented by a range of vital works.

The exhibition was supported by the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Exhibition Fund. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.