Architecture from eclecticism to modernism: Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852–1926) was a Catalan architect from Spain, known as the greatest exponent of Catalan Modernism.

Gaudí’s works have a highly individualized, sui generis style. Most of those buildings are located in Barcelona, including his main work, the church of the Sagrada Família.

Gaudí’s work was influenced by his passions in life: architecture, nature, and religion. He considered every detail of his creations and integrated into his architecture such crafts as ceramics, stained glass, wrought ironwork forging, and carpentry. He also introduced new techniques in the treatment of materials, such as trencadís, which used waste ceramic pieces.

Under the influence of Neo-Gothic art and Oriental techniques, Gaudí became part of the Modernist movement, which was reaching its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work transcended mainstream Modernisme, culminating in an organic style inspired by natural forms very near to German Expressionism. Gaudí rarely drew detailed plans of his works, instead preferring to create them as three-dimensional scale models and molding the details as he conceived them.

The German expressionist architects

Erich Mendelsohn

Erich Mendelsohn (21 March 1887 – 15 September 1953) was a Ger­man architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalis­m in his projects for department stores and cine­mas. Mendelsohn is a pioneer of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture, notably with his 1921 Mossehaus design.

Hans Scharoun

Bernhard Hans Henry Scharoun (1893–1972) was a German architect best known for designing the Berliner Philharmonie (home to the Berlin Philharmonic) and the first working-class quarters (Siedlungen) in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. He was an important exponent of organic and expressionist architecture. In 1919, after the war, Scharoun assumed responsibility for its office as a freelance architect in Breslau (Wrocław). There and in Insterburg (Chernyakhovsk), he realized numerous projects and organised art exhibi­tions, such as the first exhibition of the expressionist group of artists, Die Brücke, in East Prussia.

Hans Poelzig and Fritz Höger

Hans Poelzig (30 April 1869 – 14 June 1936) was a German architect, painter, and set designer. After finishing his architectural education around the turn of the century, Poelzig designed many industrial buildings. He was appointed city architect of Dresden in 1916 and meanwhile an influential member of the Deutscher Werkbund.

Poelzig was also known for his distinctive 1919 interior redesign of the Berlin Grosses Schauspielhaus for Weimar manager Max Reinhardt, and also as architectural set designs for the 1920 UFA film production of The Golem: How He Came Into the World. With his Weimar architect con­5 temporaries like Bruno Taut and Ernst May, Poelzig’s work developed through Expressionism and the New Objectivity in the mid-1920s before approaching a more conventional, economical style. In 1927, he was one of the exhibitors in the first international style project, the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart. In the 1920s he created his startup “Studio Poelzig” in partnership with his wife Marlene (Nee Moeschke) (1894–1985). Poelzig also designed the 1929 Broadcasting House in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg, a landmark of architecture.

Poelzig’s single best-known building is the enormous and legendary I.G. Farben Building, completed in 1931 as the administration building for IG Farben in Frankfurt am Main, now known as the Poelzig Building at Goethe University.

Hermann Fehling and Daniel Gogel

The architects Hermann Fehling (a Scharoun and Mendelsohn’s former apprentice and collaborator) and Daniel Gogel (Bruno Taut’s former apprentice) realized a number of buildings between 1953 and 1990 that are among the particularly influential and interesting buildings of post-war modernism in Germany. Her work includes church and residential buildings as well as special buildings for scientific institutes, including the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching near Munich, and the headquarters of the European Southern Observatory, also in Garching.

Expressionism in Europe

Expressionism in Germany: Die Brücke (The Bridge) Movement

Die Brücke (The Bridge) was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Mueller. The seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and the creation of expressionism. The group came to an end around 1913. The Brücke Museum in Berlin was named in honour of this group.

Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the roughly contemporary French group of the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitive art expressing extreme emotion through strong use of colours that were very often non-naturalistic.

Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipa­thy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke themes are around paintings of city streets and erotic subjects, often more harsh than their French counterparts (the Fauves), who look more smooth.

The new cinema

Once after the end of the first World War in 1918, Germany fell in the storm of a revolution. Like the breakdown of the Russian Empire in 1917, the German Emperor William II escaped from Berlin, leaving the nation without leadership. Socialists and Liberals united to form a new provisional government in the little city of Weimar. Radical socialists (later Communists) declared a new popular republic following the example of the Russian Revolution led by Lenin. Meanwhile, Germany saw a rise of a new golden age of artists and new meanings. Some of them were a reprise of what was innovative just before the war. “Die Brücke” movement and other seeds of modernism were at the pillar of this new era. Not only the fine arts but also the new cinema exstabilished new masterpieces. “The Cabi­net of Doctor Caliga­ri” by Robert Wiene in 1919 was a feast of themes, scenography, and characters that seemed to be escaped by “Die Brücke” paintings.

The architect Hans Poelzig created the scenographies for the film “Der Golem” by Paul Wegener in 1920, while “Nosferatu” (inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula) by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau of 1922 became a guide for every horror film until today.

Expressionism in France: Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (1869–1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original skills on drawings. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colorism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (wild beasts). Many of his finest works were created in the first decade of the 20th century, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice (South France), with a more relaxed style of his work. During the 1920s, he was praised as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. Prevented from painting by illness, during his last years he created an impressive collection of new artworks using paper collage. Spanning masterpieces over a half- century, Matisse is recognized as a leading figure in modern art.

Expressionism, Proto-Cubism in France

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and scene painter who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the large variety of styles he contributed to developing. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Guernièca (1937), a dramatic interpretation of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso’s work is often boxed and divided into different periods. While the last of them are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also defined as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is related to a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s has often had characteristics of Surrealism. His later work combines elements of his earlier styles.

The Italian futurism: a summary of modernism, cubism and abstractism

The Italian futurism

Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an artistic and social movement born in Italy in the early 20th century and also developed in Russia. This strange movement emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as cars, airplanes, supporting the industrial view of a city. The key figures were the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Exalting modernity and planning to liberate Italy from the weight of its past, this movement was often very near to being outrageous. Important Futurist works included Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla’s painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo’s The Art of Noises.

Although it was largely an Italian phenomenon, there were parallel movements in Russia, where some Russian Futurists founded later groups of their own; other countries had bunches of Futurists or movements sympathizing with Futurism. The futurist project was to create a new universe of art and costumes, where not only fine arts but also ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theater, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and even cooking should have been re-invented.