Background
Funny faces and angular dancers
At the beginning of the twentieth century, people felt a need to change everything about art: Expressionists dedicated themselves to following their natural impulses while Constructivists sought refuge in geometric shapes.
Sybren Eppinga
Wednesday 23 October 2013
Emil Nolde - Tanzerin (1913)

Visitors to Leiden’s Lakenhal Museum are lured along a fluorescent carpet strip towards a woman. "Sitting Nude" by expressionist Jan Wiegers is the overture of the exhibition and leads to more nudity and a rich collection of very special works.

The exhibition "Utopia 1900 -1940: Visions of a New World" includes paintings and sculptures, photographs, films and fashion that were intended to create the "New Human". A few years ago, visitors flocked to the Lakenhal to see an exhibition on Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl, making it clear that for further studies into visionary artists of the twentieth century were required.

The first decades of that century had been tough and artists found themselves yearning for a "new society". They changed tack, attempting to shape their Utopian ideals. This new course split into two directions: Expressionism and Constructivism.

The Expressionists wanted to express feeling, individual freedom, movement, colour and nudity. They wanted to invoke "primitive" and "wild" feelings to allow their emotions to run free. As the German painter Emil Nolde once said: "The artist does not have to know very much. It is best to let him work instinctively."

Nolde’s painting "Tanzerin" is perhaps the most eloquent example of this movement, a topless dancer. Or three naked people running through the dunes. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Expressionism made it happen.In addition, artists used film and photography to allow everything go, as you can see in the photographs by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, in which naked people walk about a room. A film fragment by Mary Wigman shows a woman pulling funny faces and making random movements. The exhibition also uniquely features dance costumes, almost a hundred years old, complete with frills, trinkets and wings, by Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt and never previously displayed in the Netherlands.

The Constructivists shifted from emotion to reason; individuality was swapped for uniformity and freedom was found in structure. Movement was mechanical to them, as Evert Rinsema said to Theo van Doesburg: "Humans are angular by nature."

The geometric forms in the painting "Two figures in a Landscape" by Kazimir Malevich are immediately noticeable. Vilmos Huszár portrays wooden and cubically formed musicians instead of a group of naturally moving violinists. And Alexander Rodchenko’s photograph of a girl doing rhythmic exercises makes her performance seem mechanical too.

In architecture, Constructivists thought design should serve people, and where Expressionist Taut designed an impressively vibrant "Glashaus", Johannes Brinkman created the Boevé residence as a kind of block of bricks. Designs consisting of straight lines were easily accessible. Now we call it design.

Museum De Lakenhal Leiden

Until 5 January 2014