Expressionism

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.

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.

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 (see Brücke, Die). 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 a spiritual vigour they felt it lacked, and they sought to do this through an elemental, primitive, 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; crude, 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 lined 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 in 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 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. Ascan 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.

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 the intensely personal and inaccessible nature of its mode of presentation. The partial reestablishment ofstability in Germany after 1924 and the growth of more overtly political styles of social realism hastened the movement's declinein the late 1920s. Expressionism was definitively killed by the advent of the Nazis to power in 1933. They branded the work of almost all Expressionists as degenerate and forbade them to exhibit or publish and eventually even to work. Many Expressionists went into exile in the United States and other countries.

SUPREMATISM

Russian Suprematism, first movement of pure geometrical abstraction in painting, originated by Kazimir S. Malevich in Russia in about 1913. In his first Suprematist work, a pencil drawing of a black square on a white field, all the elements of objective representation that had characterized his earlier, Cubist-Futurist style, had been eliminated. Malevich explained that “the appropriatemeans of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.” Referring to his first Suprematist work, he identified the black square with feeling and the white background with expressing “the void beyond this feeling.”

Although his early Suprematist compositions most likely date from 1913, they were not exhibited until 1915, the year he edited the Suprematist manifesto, with the assistance of several writers, most notably the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In these first Suprematist works—consisting of simple geometrical forms such as squares, circles, and crosses—he limited his palette to black, white, red, green, and blue. By 1916–17 he was presenting more complex shapes (fragments of circles, tiny triangles); extending his colour range to include brown, pink, and mauve; increasing the complexity of spatial relationships; and introducing the illusion of the three-dimensional into his painting. His experiments culminated in the “White on White” paintings of 1917–18, in which colour was eliminated, and the faintly outlined square barely emerged from its background. Finally, at a one-man exhibition of his work in 1919, Malevich announced the end of the Suprematist movement.

Suprematism had a few adherents among lesser known artists, such as Ivan Kliun, Ivan Puni, and Olga Rosanova. While not affiliated with the movement, the distinguished Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky showed the influence of Suprematism in the geometrization of his forms after 1920. This geometrical style, together with other abstract trends in Russian art, was transmitted by way of Kandinsky and the Russian artist El Lissitzky to Germany, particularly to the Bauhaus (q.v.), in the early 1920s.

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