Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.Chris Baldick Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, entry for Expressionism Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaningVictorino Tejera, 1966, pages 85,140, Art and Human Intelligence, Vision Press Limited, London of emotional experience rather than physical reality.The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, 1976 edition, page 294
Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,Bruce Thompson, University of California, Santa Cruz, lecture on Weimar culture/Kafka'a Prague particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music. Paris became a gathering place for a group of Expressionist artists, many of Jewish origin, dubbed the School of Paris. After World War II, figurative expressionism influenced artists and styles around the world.
The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a historical sense, much older painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual and subjective perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism. page 241
Etymology and history
While the word expressionist was used in the modern sense as early as 1850, its origin is sometimes traced to paintings exhibited in 1901 in Paris by obscure artist Julien-Auguste Hervé, which he called Expressionismes.John Willett, Expressionism. New York: World University Library, 1970, p.25; Richard Sheppard, "German Expressionism", in Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. Bradbury & McFarlane, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976, p.274. An alternative view is that the term was coined by the Czech art historian Antonin Matějček in 1910 as the opposite of Impressionism: "An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself... (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures... Impressions and mental images that pass through ... people's soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence [...and] are assimilated and condensed into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols."Cited in Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 175.
Important precursors of Expressionism were the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), especially his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1892); the later plays of the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849–1912), including the trilogy To Damascus (1898–1901), A Dream Play (1902), The Ghost Sonata (1907); Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), especially the "Lulu" plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) (1904); the American poet Walt Whitman's (1819–1892) Leaves of Grass (1855–1891); the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881); Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944); Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890); Belgian painter James Ensor (1860–1949);R. S. Furness, Expressionism. London: Methuen, pp.2–14; Willett, pp. 20–24. and pioneering Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, formed Die Brücke (the Bridge) in the city of Dresden. This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from Wassily Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903. Among their members were Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and August Macke. However, the term Expressionism did not firmly establish itself until 1913.Richard Sheppard, p.274. Though mainly a German artistic movement initiallyNote the parallel French movement Fauvism and the English Vorticism: "The Fauvist movement has been compared to German Expressionism, both projecting brilliant colors and spontaneous brushwork, and indebted to the same late nineteenth-century sources, especially Van Gogh." Sabine Rewald, "Fauvism", In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/fauv/hd_fauv.htm (October 2004); and "Vorticism can be thought of as English Expressionism." Sherrill E. Grace, Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989, p. 26. and most predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910 and 1930, most precursors of the movement were not German. Furthermore, there have been expressionist writers of prose fiction, as well as non-German-speaking expressionist writers, and, while the movement declined in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were subsequent expressionist works.
Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with other major 'isms' of the modernist period: with Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism."Sherrill E. Grace, Regression and Apacaypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989, p.26). Richard Murphy also comments, "the search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging expressionists such as Kafka, Gottfried Benn and Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous 'anti-expressionists.'"Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 43.
What can be said, however, is that it was a movement that developed in the early twentieth century, mainly in Germany, in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central means by which expressionism identifies itself as an avant-garde movement, and by which it marks its distance to traditions and the cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation."Richard Murphy, p. 43. More explicitly, that the expressionists rejected the ideology of realism.Murphy, especially pp. 43–48; and Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1959, especially Chapter One.
The term refers to an "artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person".Britannica Online Encyclopaedia (February, 2012). It is arguable that all artists are expressive but there are many examples of art production in Europe from the 15th century onward which emphasize extreme emotion. Such art often occurs during times of social upheaval and war, such as the Protestant Reformation, German Peasants' War, and Eighty Years' War between the Spanish and the Netherlands, when extreme violence, much directed at civilians, was represented in propagandist popular prints. These were often unimpressive aesthetically but had the capacity to arouse extreme emotions in the viewer.
Expressionism has been likened to Baroque by critics such as art historian Michel Ragon and German philosopher Walter Benjamin. According to Alberto Arbasino, a difference between the two is that "Expressionism doesn't shun the violently unpleasant effect, while Baroque does. Expressionism throws some terrific 'fuck yous', Baroque doesn't. Baroque is well-mannered."
Notable Expressionists Some of the style's main visual artists of the early 20th century were:
Argentina: Xul Solar Armenia: Martiros Saryan Australia: Sidney Nolan, Charles Blackman, John Perceval, Albert Tucker, and Joy Hester. Austria: Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Josef Gassler and Alfred Kubin Belgium: Marcel Caron, Anto Carte, and Auguste Mambour, and the Flemish Expressionists: Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, James Ensor, Albert Servaes, Floris Jespers, Gustave Van de Woestijne and Tony Mafia. Brazil: Anita Malfatti, Cândido Portinari, Di Cavalcanti, Iberê Camargo and Lasar Segall. Denmark: Einer Johansen, Jens Søndergaard, Oluf Høst Estonia: Konrad Mägi, Eduard Wiiralt, Kuno Veeber Finland: Tyko Sallinen,Ian Chilvers, The Oxford dictionary of art, Volume 2004, Oxford University Press, p. 506. Alvar Cawén, and Wäinö Aaltonen. France: Frédéric Fiebig, Georges Rouault, Alexandre Frenel, Georges Gimel, Gen Paul, Marie-Thérèse Auffray, Jacques Démoulin and Bernard Buffet. Germany: Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Fritz Bleyl, Heinrich Campendonk, Otto Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Carl Hofer, Max Kaus, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Mueller, Gabriele Münter, Rolf Nesch, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Christian Rohlfs, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Georg Tappert and Wolfgang Wolff. Greece: George Bouzianis Hungary: Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry Iceland: Einar Hákonarson Ireland: Jack B. Yeats Indonesia: Affandi, Hasan Djaafar, Hendra Gunawan and S. Sudjojono Israel: Isaac Frenkel Frenel Italy: Amedeo Modigliani, Emilio Giuseppe Dossena Japan: Kōshirō Onchi Latvia: Jānis Tīdemanis Lebanon: Rafic Charaf Mexico: Mathias Goeritz (German émigré to Mexico), Rufino Tamayo Netherlands: Willem Hofhuizen, Herman Kruyder, Jan Sluyters, Jan Wiegers and Hendrik Werkman Norway: Edvard Munch, Kai Fjell Poland: Henryk Gotlib Portugal: Mário Eloy, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso Russia: Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, Alexej von Jawlensky, Natalia Goncharova, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Marianne von Werefkin (Russian-born, later active in Germany and Switzerland). Romania: Horia Bernea Serbia: Nadežda Petrović South Africa: Maggie Laubser, Irma Stern Spain Ignacio Zuloaga, José Gutiérrez Solana, Julio Romero de Torres Sweden: Ester Almqvist, Leander Engström, Isaac Grünewald, Axel Törneman Switzerland: Carl Eugen Keel, Cuno Amiet, Paul Klee Ukraine: Alexis Gritchenko (Ukraine-born, most active in France), Vadim Meller United Kingdom: Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud, Patrick Heron, John Hoyland, Howard Hodgkin, John Walker United States: Ivan Albright, David Aronson, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, George Biddle, Hyman Bloom, Peter Blume, Charles Burchfield, David Burliuk, Stuart Davis, Lyonel Feininger, Wilhelmina Weber Furlong, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Beauford Delaney, Arthur G. Dove, Norris Embry, Philip Evergood, Kahlil Gibran, William Gropper, Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley, Albert Kotin, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rico Lebrun, Jack Levine, Alfred Henry Maurer, Robert Motherwell, Alice Neel, Abraham Rattner, Esther Rolick, Ben Shahn, Harry Shoulberg, Joseph Stella, Harry Sternberg, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Dorothea Tanning, Steffen Thomas, Wilhelmina Weber, Max Weber, Hale Woodruff, Karl Zerbe. Uruguay: Rafael Barradas
Groups of painters In Germany and Austria