Extraordinary Passions: Expressionist Women and the Makings of Modernity

Whilst Expressionism is generally known to UK audiences through the work of its male protagonists (in particular Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Kirchner and Kandinsky), the major women associated with the style are less familiar, though no less central to its development and dissemination. A recent resurgence of interest in Expressionist artists such as Paula Modersohn Becker and Sigrid Hjertén, and concomitant reassessments of the work of Käthe Kollwitz have demonstrated increasing audience appetite for exhibitions and publications that promote the work of modern women artists. Extraodinary Passions will reconsider the artworks of Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin, as well as works by a number of other women artists and sculptors in their circle and beyond, for whom expressionism remained the major vehicle for conveying their aesthetic and conceptual concerns. The book will be divided into thematic chapters based around genres of favoured subject matter (portraits, self-portraits, children, nudes, landscape and still life). By focusing only on women artists' experiences of modernity in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Expressionist Women will offer new narratives of the histories of modernism that continue to resonate with many of today's anxieties about identity, maternal experience, migration and belonging.