From the first decade of the 20th century, artists in Germany and Austria began experimenting with the radical potential of working on paper. The graphic arts provided opportunities to express complex ideas through the manipulation of materials and innovations in both subject matter and form. During this period, artists began depicting subjects that challenged inherited social and class norms, openly expressing anxieties around their threatened and unstable masculinity, and pushing at the very boundaries of what constituted art. In formal terms, they rejected the status of art as decorative, scorned traditional, idealised representations of the subject, and in some cases, dispensed with recognisable forms entirely.
The panel event has been organised to coincide with the exhibition With Graphic Intent at The Courtauld Gallery (1 March – 22 June 2025). The exhibition presents a selection of works that grew out of these artistic experiments, primarily from The Courtauld’s collection but also including some works on loan from two distinguished private collections, and has been curated by Dr Niccola Shearman and Dr Emily Christensen, both Associate Lecturers at The Courtauld. Included in the exhibition are works by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. All the represented artists were associated in various ways with the Expressionist tendencies of the period. What they have in common, despite their divergent presentations, is their evident intention to use graphic arts to provoke profound responses from viewers.
The event will comprise short presentations of recent academic research on several of the artists and artworks from the exhibition, followed by a group discussion among the participants. We will explore the meaning of and responses to the works in the context of their creation, and also how they continue to be relevant in the present day.
Organised by Dr Niccola Shearman and Dr Emily Christensen, Associate Lecturers, The Courtauld, coinciding with their exhibition With Graphic Intent at The Courtauld.
Speakers:
Professor Dorothy Price (The Courtauld) is a specialist in modern and contemporary art and critical race art history and a Fellow of The British Academy. Her work across modern and contemporary art is informed by her engagement with decoloniality, gender, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, Black studies and critical race art history. From 2018 to 2023 she was Editor of Art History, the journal of the Association for Art History. Her programme of special issues included ‘Weimar’s Others’, ‘British Art and the Global’ and together with the artist Sonia Boyce OBE RA, ‘Rethinking British Art. Black Artists and Modernism.’ She has published on the work of Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid, Veronica Ryan, Chantal Joffe, Claudette Johnson, Chila Burman, Matthew Krishanu, Permindar Kaur amongst others, as well as two monographs on modern art in Germany, Representing Berlin in 2003 and After Dada in 2014.
Dr Niccola Shearman (The Courtauld) is an associate lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She has held academic positions at the University of Manchester and is a regular contributor to Courtauld Short Courses. Her teaching concentrates on art in Germany and Austria to 1945 and her own research into the modernist woodcut print combines theories of empathy and the psychology of vision in questioning the emotional response to the medium in the aftermath of the First World War. Her article ‘Emotional Viewing’ was published in a special edition of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance in 2023. She also contributed to the Tate Expressionists publication, is writing on an émigré Viennese artist and is co-editor of a volume of essays in honour of the late Dr Shulamith Behr (forthcoming, 2025).
Dr Emily Christensen (The Courtauld) is an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Emily teaches European 19th and 20th century art, and on issues of empire and representation in Orientalism. Her own research has focused on Orientalism in the work of Expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, and she has published on these artists in The Burlington Magazine, World Art, Aesthetica Universalis and Manazir and has contributed exhibition catalogue essays on both Kandinsky and Münter for the exhibition Re-Orientations: Europe and Islamic Art, from 1851 to Today at the Kunsthaus in Zürich (2023) and for Tate’s exhibition Expressionists (2024).
Dr Anne Grasselli (The Courtauld) received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2024, and she is currently an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research focuses on intersections between the art and theories of Wassily Kandinsky and studies in visual perception that were espoused by such experimental psychologists as Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt and Theodor Lipps. Anne has most recently published her research in a chapter on ‘Abstracting Empathy: Wassily Kandinsky and His Artistic Interpretations of Visual Perception’ in the edited volume History, Practice and Pedagogy: Empathic Engagements in the Visual Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
Bernadette Reinhold (Oskar Kokoschka Zentrum, Vienna) has been Director of the Oskar Kokoschka Center (Art Collection and Archive) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2008. She has held research positions at the Commission for Provenance Research at the Federal Monuments Office and on the Vienna Hofburg project and has been board member of the Austrian Society for Architecture (2000-2005) and the Oskar Kokoschka Dokumentation Pöchlarn (since 2009). Her doctorate (2017) on Kokoschka and Austrian cultural policy led to the publication Oskar Kokoschka und Österreich, Facetten einer politischen Biografie (2023). Further scholarship and collaborative research projects include: Oskar Kokoschka. Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven. New Insights and Perspectives (2021, ed., with R. Bonnefoit); Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Architecture. Politics. Gender. New Perspectives in Her Life and Work (2023, ed., with Marcel Bois). A major review of the activities of the University of the Applied Arts during the mid-twentieth-century saw the publication „Sonderfall“ Angewandte. Die Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien im Austrofaschismus, Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkriegszeit (ed., w. Ch Wieder) and will bring, in 2026, Unwritten Biographies – Fractures and Continuities: Artists of the Angewandte Vienna 1933-1955.
Cat Hepburn (Writer and Poet) is an award-winning scriptwriter, author, and copywriter based in Berlin. Cat writes for screen, stage and page. Her second book Dating & Other Hobbies came out in 2021. That year she was nominated for Best Writer at the Scottish Comedy Awards. #GIRLHOOD, the solo show she created, based on her book of the same name, debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe to 4 and 5-star reviews. Currently, she has a TV show in development with Insight MP, and her first novel, I Kissed a Werewolf and I Liked It is coming out in Spring 2025 with Wildfire Publishing.
