German, Swiss and Austrian Painting

None of the team SoGerman are specialists in art history, but we have chosen 20 or so artists who appealed to our somewhat untutored tastes and hope that you will enjoy them too. The emphasis has been very much on 20th century artists, as that is what we know the most about, but there are a few from the 19th century and one or two contemporaries, and will be adding to both of those categories in time. The introductory page presents a few highlights from a variety of painters, and if you are interested you can then go down a layer further and look in specific single artist folders. We haven’t divided these up by language this time, as it would require rather too much clicking, we thought, but we have usually put in a piece of biography in both English and German. In order to further reduce the amount of clicking required to look at the paintings, we have tended to go for YouTube videos presenting sequences of works. Sometimes with a good soundtrack, sometimes……

Caspar David Friedrich  is probably the best-known of the German Romantic painters  of the 19th-century.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)  was the most prominent Jugendstil (it is the equivalent  in many ways of Art Nouveau) artist in the German-speaking world.  His best-known painting Der Kuss/The Kiss  features on calendars, biscuit tins  etc  throughout the world.

Otto Dix  (1891-1969)  began as an expressionist painter, but after the Great War, he was part of a movement which aimed to depict the harshness and brutality  of the Weimar Republic,  known as Neue Sachlichkeit,  sometimes translated as  “New Objectivity”.

Paul Klee is rather hard to characterise,  as he was influenced by all of the artistic  currents available to him ,  but manage to adapt them in his own manner.