expressionism

Style of painting and sculpture that expresses inner emotions; in particular, a movement in early 20th-century art in northern and central Europe. Expressionist artists tended to distort or exaggerate natural colour and appearance in order to describe an inner vision or emotion; the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's Skriket/The Scream (1893; National Gallery, Oslo) is perhaps the most celebrated example.

In expressionism, it is considered more important that the work depicts the subjective, personal emotions accurately, than that the subjects drawn are an accurate, external presentation of reality. Despite this one, unifying motivation behind expressionism, there is no single, particular style associated with the movement. Other leading expressionist artists were James Ensor, who employed vivid colours in his images of grotesque masks and skeletons, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Chaïm Soutine. The groups die Brücke and der Blaue Reiter were associated with this movement, and the expressionist trend in German art emerged even more strongly after World War I in the work of Max Beckmann and George Grosz.

Origins of expressionism The post-Impressionist painters Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, with their intense and emotive use of colour, are seen as the forerunners of expressionism, although the term is only usually applied to artists of the 20th-century movement. Munch used even more violent colours and simplification of form than van Gogh and Gauguin to evoke intense, often anguished, feelings.

The word expressionism was first used in 1901 by the French painter Julien-August Hervé. In his book Expressionismus in 1914, the critic Paul Fechter drew a distinction between ‘intensive expressionism’, which is shaped by the artist's inner world; and ‘extensive expressionism’, in which the inner life engages with external reality. Other writers who had a considerable influence on German expressionism included the philosophers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and the novelist Dostoevsky.

The movement can be seen to some extent as a reaction against the bourgeois and increasingly mechanized pre-World War I European society. Artists wanted to subvert the external social order by expressing the unrecognized or subconscious forces of the inner life.

Pre-World War I expressionist groups The most conscious expressionist movements in the visual arts were the German groups, die Brücke and der Blaue Reiter. Die Brücke group, in keeping with the reaction against the bourgeois, shared a common studio and followed the medieval guild idea of working as a brotherhood rather than being in commercial competition with each other. This German group was formally set up in Dresden in 1905 by four architectural students, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. The original group later increased in numbers with the addition of Max Pechstein, the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet, and the Finnish artist Axel Gallen-Kella. The group became interested in primitive art as a model for the direct expression of emotions and sexual imagery. In 1911 the group moved to Berlin, and the following year participated in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition. Der Blaue Reiter group had only formed in 1911, although both groups disbanded at similar times just before World War I.

In contrast to die Brücke, der Blaue Reiter painted in a more abstract style, closer to Fechter's ‘intensive Expressionism’. Led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, der Blaue Reiter represented the high point of German Expressionism. According to Kandinsky, their name came from Marc's love of horses, his own love of riders, and a shared passion for the colour blue. The group was never formally an organized society, but the name was used as the title for two exhibitions and a calendar published in 1912.

Meanwhile in France, 1905 saw the establishment of a group of Expressionist painters called the Fauves (see fauvism). The Fauves, including Derain, van Dongen, Dufy, Friesz, Marquet, and Vlaminck, were a group of friends centred around Henri Matisse, who met informally over a period of approximately three years. Their work provoked severe criticism, especially for its use of non-naturalistic colour.

Other developments in expressionism prior to World War I were the merging of expressionist and cubist approaches by some artists, and the absorption of influences from theosophy and Indian mysticism.

The impact of war The horrors of the war resulted in the development of political consciousness in the work of painters such as Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Beckmann, for example, in Beckmann's painting The Night of 1918–19. The expressionist artists August Macke and Franz Marc were killed in the war. In the years after World War I, Soutine emerged as the greatest of the French expressionists. Expressionism became the dominant movement in Germany, but in 1933 it was suppressed by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.

With reference to the years since World War II the term expressionist is not applied to a group or movement of artists, but is used generally to describe the work of a number of artists, notably Georg Baselitz, Marc Chagall, and Francis Bacon. See also tachisme and abstract expressionism.

expressionism

In music, use of melodic or harmonic distortion for expressive effect, associated with Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Křenek, and others.

expressionism

In cinema, the stylization of sets, acting, and lighting influenced by the 20th-century German art movement of the same name. The sets were distorted and largely abstract and played as important a role as the actors. Lighting was used to emphasize deep shadows and the camera was oddly angled to highlight the grotesque and fantastic.

Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) is the prime example of expressionism as it developed in the later silent era of German cinema. The influence of expressionism can be detected in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Michael Powell, and Martin Scorsese. Other key examples are Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920), F W Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Paul Leni's Waxworks (1924).

expressionism

Literary style which, like expressionism in art, attempts to portray the inner workings of a person's mind by, effectively, turning them ‘inside out’ and allowing mental states to shape their face, body, and even the world in which they live. In theatre, expressionism results in a drama of social protest, in which representation of the outer world took second place to the inner turmoil experienced by the main character, which is expressed via long monologues.

This can be seen as a reaction against a comfortable, unthinking, uncaring and increasingly mechanized society. Central characters, particularly in the work of Austrian novelist Franz Kafka, are trapped inside a distorted vision of the world that either reflects their own psychological conflicts or those of the society in which the original readers lived. German novelists associated with expressionism also include Max Brod, and Karl Kraus. Expressionist literature in Germany was effectively wiped out by the Nazis in the 1930s.

In expressionist literature, the physical consequences of a distorted situation are followed through as if it were completely real. Expressionist writers divide over the final consequences of this. Personal tragedies usually end in the destruction of the character. However, when the focus is the state of society a positive ending can result, with the victory of traditional human values over repression and mass production. This is particularly apparent in the theatre. Expressionist drama flourished in Germany, in the work of Reinhard Johannes Sorge, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Paul Kornfeld, Reinhard Johannes Sorge, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Paul Kornfeld, Fritz von Unruh, and Walter Hasenclever. Brecht and Piscator developed a form known as epic theatre.

In the USA, a strong expressionist influence can be traced in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. In Irish literature, some of the work of Seán O'Casey and James Joyce can be characterized as expressionist. Notable expressionist poetry includes the work of Georg Heym, Ernst Stradler, August Stramm, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, and Else Lasker-Schüler. This poetry eschewed details of description and narrative, and attempted a lyrical intensity capable of conveying the essence of an inward experience. As in expressionist drama and painting, disgust with materialistic society was combined with a sense of foreboding of its imminent collapse.