The end of the 19th Century was marked by the unrest of the industrial revolution and rapid advances in engineering and science. Steel and machine characterized the industrial age.

In Paris on 31 March 1889 the Eiffel tower was finished. It was built for the Universal Exposition (1889 World's Fair) which celebrated the centenary of the French Revolution. At 324 meters, it was the tallest building in the world until 1930 when the Chrysler Building in New York surpassed it. The Eiffel tower came equipped with Otis elevators, a French company. The elevator's vertical movement of people made possible the skyscrapers of the 20th Century.

Eiffel Tower
1889
Architect: Stephen Sauvestre.
Engineers: Maurice Koechlin & Emile Nouguier.
Contractor: Gustave Eiffel & Cie.
Construction : 1887 - 1889 (2 years, 2 months and 5 days).

This fifteen years before the Great War was a lively one for all the arts. Music was in transition, the late Romantic works of Wagner, Mahler, and Bruckner were premiered and became controversial or forgotten, as the case may be. The Mahler symphonies were forgotten for another fifty years, until they finally began to be heard again. But among composers a need for a new direction was emerging. There was something too saccharin in the Romantic movement; it needed a dose of real life to make the music live. The pictorial arts had moved away from Romanticism half a century before, and artists were ready to move again. In music where romanticism still dominated, impressionism in music had just begun to take hold, but it was short lived. In 1913 Stravinsky and Diagalev broke new ground with ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), which caused great controversy. It represented a theme of violence and drive that invigorated new music.

Debussy's ballet Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was commissioned and presented by the Diaghilev ballet troupe. It caused much controversy; not so much for the music, but the Vaslav Nijinsky choreography and his sexual interpretation, which certainly scandalized the public. The story of the ballet centers around a faun who falls in love with a nymph in an afternoon revere. It is not clear if the nymph is fantasy or reality. The nymph disappears but leaves her scarf, the faun performs some simulated sex with the scarf, representing his desires, I suppose. The audience was outraged. This parallels the controversy experienced by the impressionist and post impressionist artists, when more explicit sexual themes became a part of the visual arts.

As the 20th Century started Post Impressionist art was becoming more and more wild — that is expressionistic. This change was, in part, because representational art began to be done cheaply by the developing technology of photography and fine art needed a new niche to fill.

The post impressionists had begun to develop expressionist art and the expressionist drive outdistanced the traditional formal art forms. In fact expressionism became so general that it tended to loose all meaning, almost everything new was expressionist. Except perhaps in America where impressionism was just beginning to take hold.

In Germany expressionism takes on a socialist / communist / anarchist political face. Art became dominated by images of the ugliness of the industrial revolution and war. But perhaps more important it takes a raw unvarnished look at humanity: it shows the poor, insane, corrupt, or sex driven to self satisfied plutocrats. In this museum there are two galleries surveying this German Expressionist revolution with about seventy five artists: the first covers the period up to the End of World War I, and the second covers the period Between the World Wars. The major expressionist artists have their own galleries with outline biographies along with 30 to 50 pictures for each. minor expressionist artists have from one to ten pictures.

This survey of pre World War I art includes the major German expressionist artists along with the major Parisian art developments. So some artists can be found in both galleries. It's not a mistake it's by intent.

This special feature was organized by Jens Peter from Denmark to show the art produced by some regional Danish artists of the period. He thinks they should be better known.