Temporalities in Modern German Art: Expressionism and After

This thesis is a study of how artists active in modern Germany contended with contemporary attempts to uniformise temporal experiences by using their artistic practices to customise their own. A major characterisation of modern German art orbits around the claims of spontaneity and immediacy, which is typically accepted as the default answer to the increasing standardisation, rationalisation, and bureaucratisation of the modern world. Applying Michael G. Flaherty’s sociological theory of “time work” to art history, I challenge this characterisation by laying bare the artists’ agentic actions—their behaviours, choices, and decisions—carefully calibrated during the artmaking process in order to facilitate a more desirable temporal scenario for themselves. I place their artistic processes, evidenced from photographs, artistic explorations, correspondences, memoirs, and biographies, in dialogue with the wider temporalities expressed in state-sponsored instruments to reveal how artistic freedom can be asserted without necessarily interfering with the status quo. In stressing this common thread between artists working across a capacious chronology and with distinct aesthetic and ideological concerns, this thesis rejects the prevailing art-historical tendency to neatly categorise modern German art into movements, styles, and groups. Interrogating the processes of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters, and Käthe Kollwitz on the same terms for the first time, I argue that modern German artists were bounded by the same impulse to assert self-determination through a crucial aspect of the modern experience: time.