Expressionism everywhere!

Play with Expressionism

Expressionism is 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. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense, expressionism was one of the main currents of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.

More specifically, expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to a number of German artists, as well as Austrian, French, and Russian ones, who became active in the years before World War I and remained so throughout much of the interwar period.

Birth and development

The roots of the German Expressionist School lay in the works of Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom, in the period 1885–1900, evolved a highly personal painting style. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity. They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.

The second and principal wave of Expressionism began about 1905, when a group of German artists led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner formed a loose association called Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). The group included Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. These painters were in revolt against what they saw as the superficial naturalism of academic Impressionism. They wanted to reinfuse German art with the spiritual vigour they felt it lacked, and they sought to do this through an elemental, highly personal, and spontaneous expression. Die Brücke’s original members were soon joined by the Germans Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Müller. The Expressionists were influenced by their predecessors of the 1890s and were also interested in African wood carvings and the works of such Northern European medieval and Renaissance artists as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Albrecht Altdorfer. They were also aware of Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and other recent movements.

The German Expressionists soon developed a style notable for its harshness, boldness, and visual intensity. They used jagged, distorted lines, rough, rapid brushwork, and jarring colours to depict urban street scenes and other contemporary subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their instability and their emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety, disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response to the ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they discerned in modern life. Woodcuts, with their thick, jagged lines and harsh tonal contrasts, were one of the favourite media of the German Expressionists.

The works of Die Brücke artists stimulated expressionism in other parts of Europe. Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele of Austria adopted their tortured brushwork and angular lines, and Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine of France each developed painting styles marked by intense emotional expression and the violent distortion of figural subject matter. The painter Max Beckmann, the graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz, and the sculptors Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, all of Germany, also worked in Expressionist modes. The artists belonging to the group known as Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) are sometimes regarded as Expressionists, although their art is generally lyrical and abstract, less overtly emotional, more harmonious, and more concerned with formal and pictorial problems than that of Die Brücke artists.

Expressionism was a dominant style in Germany in the years immediately following World War I, where it suited the postwar atmosphere of cynicism, alienation, and disillusionment. Some of the movement’s later practitioners, such as George Grosz and Otto Dix, developed a more pointed, socially critical blend of expressionism and realism known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). As can be seen from such labels as Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism, the spontaneous, instinctive, and highly emotional qualities of Expressionism have been shared by several subsequent art movements in the 20th century.

Expressionism in literature

Expressionism in literature arose as a reaction against materialism, complacent bourgeois prosperity, rapid mechanization and urbanization, and the domination of the family within pre-World War I European society. It was the dominant literary movement in Germany during and immediately after World War I.

In forging a drama of social protest, Expressionist writers aimed to convey their ideas through a new style. Their concern was with general truths rather than with particular situations; hence, they explored in their plays the predicaments of representative symbolic types rather than of fully developed individualized characters. The emphasis was laid not on the outer world, which is merely sketched in and barely defined in place or time, but on the internal, on an individual’s mental state; hence, the imitation of life is replaced in Expressionist drama by the ecstatic evocation of states of mind. The leading character in an Expressionist play often pours out his or her woes in long monologues couched in a concentrated, elliptical, almost telegrammatic language that explores youth’s spiritual malaise, its revolt against the older generation, and the various political or revolutionary remedies that present themselves. The leading character’s inner development is explored through a series of loosely linked tableaux, or “stations,” during which he revolts against traditional values and seeks a higher spiritual vision of life.

August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind were notable forerunners of Expressionist drama, but the first full-fledged Expressionist play was Reinhard Johannes Sorge’s Der Bettler (“The Beggar”), which was written in 1912 but not performed until 1917. The other principal playwrights of the movement were Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Paul Kornfeld, Fritz von Unruh, Walter Hasenclever, and Reinhard Goering, all of Germany.

Expressionist poetry, which arose at the same time as its dramatic counterpart, was similarly nonreferential and sought an ecstatic, hymnlike lyricism that would have considerable associative power. This condensed, stripped-down poetry, utilizing strings of nouns and a few adjectives and infinitive verbs, eliminated narrative and description to get at the essence of feeling. The principal Expressionist poets were Georg Heym, Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, and Else Lasker-Schüler of Germany, and the Czech poet Franz Werfel. The dominant theme of Expressionist verse was horror over urban life and apocalyptic visions of the collapse of civilization. Some poets were pessimistic and contented themselves with satirizing bourgeois values, while others were more concerned with political and social reform and expressed hope for a coming revolution. Outside Germany, playwrights who used Expressionist dramatic techniques included the American authors Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice.

The Scream Edvard Munch Expressionism — The Scream, casein on cardboard, Edvard Munch, 1893, National Gallery, Oslo

Expressionism in other arts

Strongly influenced by Expressionist stagecraft, the earliest Expressionist films set out to convey through decor the subjective mental state of the protagonist.

The most famous of these films is Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which a madman relates his understanding of how he came to be in the asylum. The misshapen streets and buildings of the set are projections of his own universe, and the other characters have been abstracted through makeup and dress into visual symbols.

The film’s morbid evocation of horror, menace, and anxiety and the dramatic, shadowy lighting and bizarre sets became a stylistic model for Expressionist films by several major German directors. Paul Wegener’s second version of The Golem (1920), F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), among other films, present pessimistic visions of social collapse or explore the ominous duality of human nature and its capacity for monstrous personal evil.

While some classify the composer Arnold Schoenberg as an expressionist because of his contribution to the Blaue Reiter almanac, musical expressionism seems to have found its most natural outlet in opera. Among early examples of such Expressionist works are Paul Hindemith’s operatic settings of Kokoschka’s proto-expressionist drama, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (1919), and August Stramm’s Sancta Susanna (1922). The most outstanding of the Expressionist operas, however, are two by Alban Berg: Wozzeck, performed in 1925, and Lulu, which was not performed in its entirety until 1979.

Side of Beef, oil on canvas by Chaim Soutine, c. 1925; in the Albright KnoxArt Gallery, Buffalo

Decline of the movement

The decline of expressionism was hastened by the vagueness of its longing for a better world, by its use of highly poetic language, and in general by the intensely personal and inaccessible nature of its mode of presentation. The partial reestablishment of stability in Germany after 1924 and the growth of more overtly political styles of social realism hastened the movement’s decline in the late 1920s. Expressionism was definitively killed by the advent of the Nazis in 1933. They branded the work of almost all Expressionists as degenerate and forbade them to exhibit, publish, and eventually even work. Many Expressionists went into exile in the United States and other countries.