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This essay begins with an examination of Balzac's "Louis Lambert," an angelic figure who ends his life in a catatonic state, a condition as inert as a stone. It goes on to examine the intersection of the theological and geological in Balzac's writings, and thinks about how this might relate to the work of similar figures in stories by authors such as Melville and Nescio, as well as a drawing by Paul Klee. The essay also considers Deleuze's writings on Melville's Bartleby, desire, hypochondria and the body without organs. It offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the latter's writings, and argues that the process of mineralisation undergone by the figures under examination, which might be described as a form of material immanence, is one that is enthralled by the drive to return to an inorganic state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Surrealist artist Richard Oelze's postwar enterprise was one of inner reflection and personal questioning linked to the broader project of coming to terms with the past. The essay takes a critical view of his artworks and his automatist Wortskizzen to assess the manner and extent to which Oelze utilizes his artistic practice as a mode of working through his, and Germany's, complicity with the Nazi regime. Analysis of the Wortskizzen exposes how verbal probing informs Oelze's visual expression of inner turmoil, while implied gaps and voids in paintings and drawings puncture space as well as time, illuminating memory and blending the past with the present. Oelze's serious play with word and image in turn invites his viewers to release repressed memories through reflective contemplation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the art exhibition "Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Impressionism to Expressionism 1900-1914" at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2014 and 2015 which features works by Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Gauguin.

A unique approach to still life painting, an animation of the inanimate, developed in the works of German expressionist artists during the period between 1910 and 1914. This essay considers how this approach relates to issues raised by Georg Simmel and Alois Riegl about social experience and art within the modern world. The works of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, it is argued, can be seen to exemplify this approach, but also to differ from it in the way their design and use of textiles, incorporation of cubist concerns about space, and references to bohemian sociability involve the artist’s lived experience of the studio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo Rauch is an important artist on the international art scene, known in particular for large, dream-inspired paintings of alienated figures in eerie landscapes. These works combine recognisable imagery with flat areas of colour, hovering in the liminal space between figuration and abstraction. Critics frequently describe these works as ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘nightmarish’. They also often point to visual references made to Socialist Realism, Dada, Pop, or comic books and print advertising of the 1950s. Close analyses of Rauch’s paintings, however, are surprisingly rare, especially in Anglo-American scholarship, which prefers to see them as having no meaning. This lack of interpretation may be due in part to the dearth of knowledge about his life and art before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This article focuses on Rauch’s art and reception before 1989/1990 in order to better understand a number of paintings he created in the late 1990s, and will argue that these more recent paintings reflect upon this past and, more specifically, upon the challenges that East German artists faced in the new Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Anselm Kiefer has often been regarded as problematic. Its fascination with Nazi history and German myth has been interpreted as reactionary political recidivism, and the coincidence of its rise to public prominence with a rightward shift in German politics only added to this suspicion. I argue that while Kiefer's work is problematic, it is because it raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between German modernism and Nazism. Though Nazism is often seen as the antithesis of the former, I suggest that much of its ideological underpinning derived from the same sources as many modernist writers and artists. In particular, the discourse of romantic anti-capitalism, which inspired both right wing modernists such as Stefan George or Ernest Jünger and the left-wing modernism of Expressionism, also informed the pastoral ideology of Nazism. A central part of Kiefer's work of the 1970s and early 1980s is an attempt to overcome the notion of representation as a mediated process, through his inclusion of `literal' materials such as sand and straw. I argue that this aspect of Kiefer's work mirrors the discourse of authenticity prevalent in romantic anti-capitalism, most obviously, perhaps in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Hence Kiefer's work, juxtaposing motifs borrowed from the history of modernism with provocative historical references, indicates that the distance between modernism and Nazism is not as great as often assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the art of German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. It is noted that Kiefer's art is his vehicle for coming to terms with Germany's Nazi past. Kiefer's search for Germany's hidden past has resulted in a series of paintings of the Parsifal legend. He chose the attic as a means to engage and confront the traumatic memories of the Nazi past. His painting "Parsifal" depicts the final scene of German composer Richard Wagner's music drama.