The Apocalyptic 20th Century

In Advent where we contemplate the final things, let's not forget the century just past. The 20th century will be remembered as a century of catastrophes. To those who lived through them, it seemed that the world was coming to an end, several times over. It's no accident that some of the most powerful apocalyptic imagery of the early 20th century comes from Germany.

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation, 1911.

Kandinsky "invented" abstract painting, at least in its modern form. He did so with an almost missionary zeal to prepare humanity for what he believed to be a coming apocalypse. Kandinsky was an enthusiastic follower of the Theosophical movement which proclaimed a basic unity behind all religion and spirituality, and prophesied a coming age of the spirit where the material world would be consumed into the timeless world of the spirit. Kandinsky believed that our senses, and all of our language and ideas based in our senses, would be of no use in this new world of pure spirit. He made paintings like this one to prepare people for a new way of seeing and thinking which he believed was imminent, and which he believed would be a joyous liberation.

Franz Marc, The Fate of the Animals, 1913

Franz Marc, The Tyrol, 1914

Franz Marc, Kandinsky's close friend and fellow painter, shared Kandinsky's belief in Theosophy and its apocalyptic message. However, Marc believed that this apocalypse would take place at the cost of great pain and suffering. Marc believed in the innocent eye of animals, uncorrupted by the greed and ambition of human civilization. He believed that animals in their innocence were closer to the timeless truths that he believed lay behind the veil of appearances. The rending of that veil, in the end time, would bring great agony to all of life, but would ultimately be redemptive.
The alternative title to his Fate of the Animals, was "The Trees Show Their Rings, The Animals Bare Their Veins." The fabric of the world and the bodies of animals are rent asunder by unnamed forces. Those same dark forces seem to lie just beneath the surface of trees and mountains in one of his last paintings, The Tyrol, a painting full of menace and foreboding.
The world did end for Marc. He was killed in the First World War at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. After his death, The Fate of the Animals was badly damaged on its right side in a fire. It was restored by the artist Paul Klee.

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic City, 1913

Ludwig Meidner, Burning City, 1913

Ludwig Meidner, from Silesia in what is now Poland, worked for many years in Berlin as an unremarkable commercial illustrator. In 1913, he painted a remarkable series of paintings of cities and landscapes being destroyed by unidentified forces. In retrospect, these seem to be amazingly prophetic paintings of what cities throughout Europe would experience in the coming decades. He never painted anything like these again. He eventually died in exile in Britain, forgotten and impoverished.

In August 1914, the world really did end, though not quite in the way the Theosophical movement anticipated.

Paul Klee, The Tympanist, 1940

Paul Klee, Death and Fire, 1940

These are 2 of Paul Klee's very last paintings made in the year of his death. In 1933, the new Nazi government dismissed him from his teaching post in Dusseldorf, and revoked his citizenship. Klee was forced to leave his adopted country of 30 years and return to Bern in his native Switzerland. In 1935, he was diagnosed with the sclerosis that would eventually kill him. In 1937, his work was seized from German museums and public collections and featured in the Degenerate Art Exhibition created by the Nazis to end modern art in Germany. Many of his works featured in that show were among the thousands burned in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Brigade headquaters. World War II began in September 1939.
Paul Klee knew he was dying as he saw a catastrophe even bigger than the one that claimed the life of his friend Franz Marc break out all over the world.
These final works have the concentration and timeless quality of ancient hieroglyphs. The arms of the Tympanist merge with his drumsticks as his cyclopean eye dominates the picture. He seems to slowly beat out the stroke of doom as he stares back at us without blinking.
What seems to be a death's head dominates Death and Fire, rearing up and confronting us before a field of fiery orange and red, and before a series of mysterious and timeless hieroglyphs.  It is painted on an unstretched swath of very rough industrial canvas.

The artists of the Middle Ages imagined world-ending catastrophe. The artists of the 20th century witnessed it, and without the consolation of that Medieval world view where the truths of revealed religion were believed to be apparent everywhere in Creation. Theirs is a very personal and direct witness to catastrophe.