Displaying items by tag: german expressionism

The decadelong quest included archive detectives, location mix-ups, vintage postcards and a coveted art collection torn apart by war. When it was done, the Museum of Modern Art decided to return an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner landscape to the heirs of its original, Jewish owner.

The museum announced Monday that the German expressionist painter’s 1917-18 canvas “Sand Hills (By Grünau)” rightly belongs to the heirs of a Berlin writer, Max Fischer, who had to leave his art behind when he fled Germany for the U.S. in late 1935.

Anniversary celebrations can easily turn vaguely sentimental, but the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is closing out its 50th year with a lineup of events more forward-looking than nostalgic. On November 7 the museum holds its annual Art + Film gala—hosted by trustee Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio—honoring artist James Turrell and filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu and featuring a performance by Sam Smith. Now in its fifth year, the event raises funds to increase film-related exhibitions on such notables as David Hockney, Christian Marclay, Tim Burton, and German Expressionist filmmakers.

Like Keats, Hank Williams and Kurt Cobain, the Austrian painter Egon Schiele was an artist who never made it out of his 20s. He succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918 at the age of 28, leaving behind a last, tortured sketch of his pregnant wife, made a day before she died in the same epidemic.

But for someone whose cheerless credo was “All things are living dead,” Schiele squeezed a lot out of the few years he was given. On Thursday, the Neue Galerie, a temple to German Expressionism, opens “Egon Schiele: Portraits,” the first American exhibition to focus on Schiele’s portraiture.