Holy Suffering Meets Expressionism

From The Living Church-

Just one hundred years ago, Vasily Kandinsky, leader of the Munich Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, published Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In the last century it has become recognized as a classic Modernist text and has remained a book fundamental to understanding art theory from that period.

In this essay, Kandinsky claimed that atheism, capitalist materialism and the worship of technology had led to a grave spiritual crisis in Western civilization, but that art, as the last bastion of the spirit, might possibly have the power to reverse this tendency toward destruction or, at the very least, help us to cope with it better.

Charlotte Lichtblau paints in a style derived from the historical Expressionism that reached maturity during the decade before the First World War in Munich but which also flourished in Dresden and Vienna, where Lichtblau grew up. The artist was born Charlotte Adleberg in 1925 of an assimilated secular Jewish family living in Austria.

After the annexation of that country by Nazi Germany in 1938, when she was 13, her mother had the children baptized as Roman Catholics and the family fled to the United States. Her work often addresses the plight of the suffering and of the refugee.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2011/7/5/holy-suffering-meets-expressionism