Cactus en fleurs, Circa 1974

Arne Siegfried  

Arne Siegfried was born in 1893 and was largely inspired by the 1900s and 1910s. The first decades of the twentieth century were marked by great progress in pictorial art. It was the era of post-impressionism and experimentation, including the first attempts at expressionism and abstraction. Many different artist groups or loosely associated avant-garde communities in different major cities around the world have developed different modes of these key innovations. The first great post-impressionist movement of the early twentieth century is widely regarded as that of the Fauves, a group for whom the vivid otherworldly colors and vivid brushstrokes were an essential component of painting, and who counted Henri Matisse among its members.

In Paris, around the same time, a young Pablo Picasso painted his famous Blue and Rose periods. At the end of the 1920s, he developed with Georges Braque the first fracture of pictorial reality with analytical Cubism. In the meantime, expressive painting has found key advocates in various places around the world. In France, the Nabis were among the first at the very beginning of the century, and the German groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter had such famous personalities as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky.

The horrors of World War I brought to light important developments in the psychological applications of art, including the absurd styles of Dadaism which materialized in Paris, Berlin, Zurich and Hanover, and which led to the recognition of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters. Many of these ideas will continue to flourish in Surrealism - the first artistic movement to fully integrate psychology, and in particular the ideas about the unconscious that had been developed by Sigmund Freud and his disciple Carl Jung.