Lovis Corinth
German artist and writer
1858 CE to 1925 CE
Lovis Corinth (July 21, 1858 – July 17, 1925) is a German artist and writer whose mature work as a painter and printmaker realizes a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism.
Corinth studies in Paris and Munich, joins the Berlin Secession group, later succeeding Max Liebermann as the group's president.
His early work is naturalistic in approach.
Corinth is initially antagonistic towards the expressionist movement, but after a stroke in 1911 his style loosens and takes on many expressionistic qualities.
His use of color becomes more vibrant, and he creates portraits and landscapes of extraordinary vitality and power.
Corinth's subject matter also includes nudes and biblical scenes.
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Lovis Corinth heads the Sezession movement against the academic school in Berlin, with the collaboration of Max Slevogt and Max Liebermann.
The forty-two-year-old German Impressionist's training had been academic, taken after 1884 in Paris under the French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
There, however, he had been influenced both by the French Impressionists and by the work of Peter Paul Rubens, and, after he settles in Berlin in 1900, his pictures, which had been at first somber, gain brilliance from the former and vitality from the latter.
Postimpressionist artists such as Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, working with the peculiar recklessness that is endemic to German painting, have unwittingly laid the technical foundations of Expressionism.
The roots of the German Expressionist school lie in the works of van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom in the period 1885-1900 had evolved a highly personal painting style.
These artists used the expressive possibilities of color and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity.
They had broken away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.