Blue Land and City Noise: An Expressionist Stroll through Art and Literature

This is a thoughtfully presented book exploring artworks from the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The book presents the pieces held by in the collections of both the Fondazione Braglia and the Franz Marc Museum. Sparing in its approach, the book uses only an introduction and periodic contemporaneous literary excerpts to frame the included works. The preface by Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy and introduction by Michael Kumpfmuller are eloquent and spare, and provide a relatively brief but useful orientation to the movement and the included pieces.

Presented on thick matte pages, each work is given its own page without commentary or unnecessary editorial intervention. The various literary excerpts–from the likes of Vladimir Nabokov and Walter Benjamin–included throughout comment only obliquely on the works around them and add an additional layer of lyricism to this virtual stroll through German Expressionism. This is an excellent book to add to your collection, one that will allow you to come back to it periodically to discover new facets of both the literary and art pieces included within.