Expressionism in "The Rainbow"

Abstract

In his essay, Lawrence as a Painter, Herbert Read observes: Lawrence was an expressionist, and he goes on to compare him with Nolde or Soutine.1 Edward Lucie-Smith relates Lawrence's advocacy of expressive form to German expressionist poetry, and his later paintings to the work of expressionists such as Kirchner.2 Canvases like Red Willows (1927) and Dance Sketch (1928) support this claim (although Lawrence's paintings tend to be transcriptions of ideas, lacking the subtle power of his verbal imagery). Most strikingly, Daniel Weiss illustrates the affinity between Lawrence's psychological vision in his novels and the expressionist art of Edvard Munch.3 Such and painterly affinities are appropriate to the movement, for as R. S. Furness notes, developments in literature and painting ran parallel, with some artists, such as Barlach and Kokoschka, outstanding in both media.4 Let me therefore make clear at the outset that in the present study refers (directly and by analogy) to Lawrence's verbal emulation of the visual arts, rather than the distinct techniques of literary practised by such writers as Strindberg, Trakl, Kafka, and Joyce.5 According to the journal Der Sturm, expressionism not a fashion, it is an attitude to life, an attitude moreover of the senses, not of the mind. 6 Definitions of the movement are therefore notoriously difficult. To Kristian Sotriffer, Its underlying characteristic . . . consists of an over-intensification of experience, a rejection of the classical canon, a distortion and exaggeration bordering on the hysterical, a shattering of traditional forms and the reordering of the fragments to make vehicles for changed thinking and sensation, and a new, more critical