Expressionism

About

Expressionism was less a single movement than a shared impulse, strongest between about 1905 and the early 1920s. Its forerunners were Vincent van Gogh, with his charged colour and brushwork, and Edvard Munch, whose The Scream (1893) turned anxiety into an image. Expressionists wanted painting to show what things feel like, not how they look.

Look for harsh or unnatural colour, jagged outlines, flattened space and bodies stretched or twisted by emotion. In Dresden the Brücke artists revived the woodcut, while in Munich Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded the Blue Rider and moved towards spiritual, abstract colour. Vienna produced a more psychological strain: Egon Schiele drew gaunt, contorted self-portraits, Oskar Kokoschka painted nervous, probing portraits, and Richard Gerstl's last self-portraits of 1908 are almost violent. The Belgian Frans Masereel told entire stories in wordless woodcut novels. The same urgency shaped film, theatre and architecture.