EXPRESSION

THEORY OF ART
Lesson 12

Sources:
https://images.app.goo.gl/pNcbnfkhaAY8abSx9
https://images.app.goo.gl/5o5NmMUszWAd54b17
https://images.app.goo.gl/LBekKGKJ1z9uCo7ZA
https://images.app.goo.gl/soRGfZJtaqQmn8M6A
 EXPRESSIONISM
• 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 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

Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/6d5XBTRXEcHWQvGe9
 EXPRESSIONISM
• 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.

• The expression theory emphasizes emotions, not

ideas or thoughts. Advantage: an idea or thought
must be about something, but some emotions do
not. So artworks that lack denotation can still be
art.

Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/SRS93ze5uuQL4QSe7
 EXPRESSIONISM
• In expressionist art, color in particular can be
highly intense and non-naturalistic, brush
work is typically free and paint application
tends to be generous and highly textured.

• Expressionist art tends to be emotional and

sometimes mystical. It can be seen as an
extension of Romanticism.

Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/Hc3LNAUoQxRxqitG8
 EXPRESSION THEORY
• The view that “art is imitation
(representation)” has not only been
challenged, it has been moribund in at least
some of the arts since the 19th century. It was
subsequently replaced by the theory that art is
expression. Instead of reflecting states of the
external world, art is held to reflect the inner
state of the artist.

Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/6PZPQoTskk3dPmsT7
 EXPRESSION THEORY
• This, at least, seems to be implicit in the
core meaning of expression: the outer
manifestation of an inner state. Art as a
representation of outer existence
(admittedly “seen through a
temperament”) has been replaced by art
as an expression of humans’ inner life.

Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/Y1h6zNsPtPni1KpA8
 EXPRESSION THEORY
• But the terms express and expression are
ambiguous and do not always denote the
same thing. Like so many other terms,
express is subject to the process-product
ambiguity: the same word is used for a
process and for the product that results
from that process.

Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/wyRx9r4rZ3XuLhpw6