by Nicolas Pioch


 

Pre-reading Discussion

1) Do you know of a particular artist whose style is considered Expressionism? Why is their art considered Expressionism?

2) What do you think about art in the category of Expressionism? Do you like it or not? Why or why not?

TIMELINE: Expressionism
1      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 in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 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. 

2      Expressionism is an artistic and literary movement born in the early years of the XXth century. Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visul object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.

3      Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910, (Mchen, Dresde, Berlin), as heir of a national trend related to Grnewald: the Wallraf-Richartz museum, in Kln, has the richest collection of this era. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Czanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement. Gustave Moreau was already saying not to believe to the reality of what he touched or saw, but instead to his own interior perception; expressionism has been holding this theory to its extreme application.

4      The most famed German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.

5      Painters as varied as Georges Rouault, Henry de Waroquier, Marcel Gromaire, Edouard Goerg have also been qualified of "French expressionists". Other members were, in Belgium, James Ensor, Permecke, Van der Bergue, Servaes were seen as disciples of Jrme Bosch and Bruegel, the Dutch Leo Gestel, the Danish Srensen, the British Lyall Watson. Among the members of the Paris school, Soutine, Pascin and Modigliani have been attached to expressionism.

After reading discussion

1) In your own words, what are the characteristics of Expressionism? Why are these characteristics important?

2) In your own words, what was Expressionism? What were the differences of Expressionism compared to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism?
 
Source:
Pioch, Nicolas. "Expressionism." Web Museum. Nov. 19, 1995. <http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/expressionism/> (May 21, 2001).