EXPRESSIONISM

BY: JAYSON TIBAYAN AND JHON ALBERT QUINONES

WHAT IS EXPRESSIONISM?

Expressionism in art is the use of colors, shapes,

compositions and other elements of art, to portray the
subjective emotions or moods of the artist. The artwork
interprets the emotion and most times that calls for the artist
to draw things that out of the bounds of realistic images
What is the difference between expressionism and
impressionism?

The difference between the two is that while in

expressionism people use the elements of art to portray or
interpret some sort of emotion, impressionism use colors
and different types of brush storokes to paint a image, it’s
basically composed of many visible brush stokes.?
WHAT IS EXPRESSIONISM?

• Presents the world solely from a subjective perspective.

• Distorts emotional effect
• Evokes moods or ideas
• Seeks to express emotional experience rather than the
physical reality
• Aims to reflect the artist’s state of mind
EXPRESSIONISM
+
• Most expressionists were also poets and these people could
transfer (or hope to) transfer their ideas from poetry to the
people through theater. 
• Confusion about the term, ‘expressionism,’ arose because it
could be used in literature, music, architecture, and art,
along with drama. 
• The term was first used by French painter, Julien Aguuste
Herve in 1910, but it didn’t achieve general
acceptance/usage until later.
EXPRESSIONISM

Expressionism Is a term
that embraces an early 20th
century style of art. Music
and literature that is
charged with a emotional
and spiritual vision of the
world.

ERNTS LUDWIG KIRCHNER (1880-1938(

“Davos under Snow” 1923 0 oil on canvas
THE ROOTS OF
EXPRESSIONISM
Expressionism is associated with Northern
Europe in general and Germany in
particular.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
 Expressionism emerged
simultaneously in various cities
across Germany as a response
to a widespread anxiety about
humanity's increasingly
discordant relationship with
the world and accompanying
lost feelings of authenticity and
spirituality.
Expressionism's Father
Eighty-one-year-old Edvard Munch (pronounced Moohnk)
was the founder of the Expressionist school of painting. He
was also a legendary eccentric.
Munch was a highly neurotic, misogynous, inward-turning
artist who led the revolt of the '90s against the formal,
detached, analytical approach of the French Impressionists.
Munch and his followers, trying for the highest degree of
personal, emotional expression, deliberately set out to step
up the passionate style of Vincent van Gogh. Munch's first
one-man Berlin exhibition, in 1892, contained 55
screechingly colored, cacophonously designed canvases.
Munch's best-known Expressionist contemporaries were
Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
 most
Expressionism was inspired

heavily by
the symbolist currents in
late-19th-century art. 
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James
Ensor proved particularly influential to the

encouraging
expressionists,

the distortion of
form and the deployment of strong colors
to convey a variety of anxieties and yearnings
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
 While the Impressionists were admiring the color and
beauty of the natural landscape, Van Gogh and Munch
took a radically different perspective.

They chose to look inwards to discover a form of

‘self-expression’ that offered them an individual
voice in a world that they perceived as both
insecure and hostile.

More subjective search for a personal emotional truth that

drove them on and ultimately paved the way for the
Expressionist art forms of the 20th century that explored the
inner landscape of the soul.
 Expressionist movement lasted from
approximately 1905 to 1920 and spread
throughout Europe.
 Its Example Would Later
Inform Abstract Expressionism
And Its Influence Would Be Felt
Throughout The Remainder Of
The Century In German Art. It
Was Also A Critical Precursor To
The Neo-expressionist Artists Of
The 1980s.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
With the turn of the century in Europe, shifts in artistic
styles and vision erupted as A response to the major changes
in the atmosphere of society.

New technologies and massive urbanization efforts altered

the individual's worldview, and artists reflected the
psychological impact of these developments by moving away
from a realistic representation of what they saw toward an
emotional and psychological rendering of how the world
affected them.
 Birth and development
• The roots of the German expressionist school lay in the
works of Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and J
ames Ensor
• These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour
• FIRST WAVE 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. 
• Broke away from the literal representation of nature in
order to express more subjective outlooks or states of
mind.
 Birth and development

• SECOND WAVE

• 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 

• They were also aware of Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and

other recent movements.
 KEY IDEAS IN EXPRESSIONISM

01 02 03
The arrival of Art was now meant to
expressionism come forth Expressionist artists
announced new from within the artist, often employed
standards in the rather than from a swirling, swaying,
creation and depiction of the external and exaggeratedly
visual world, quality of
judgment of art.  work of art became the
executed
character of the artist’s brushstrokes in the
feeling. depiction of their
subjects
KEY IDEAS IN EXPRESSIONISM
01
Through their confrontation with
the urban world of the early-
20th century, expressionist artists
developed A powerful mode of
social criticism in their
serpentine figural renderings
and bold colors.
02
Their representations of the
modern city included
alienated individuals - a
psychological by-product of
recent urbanization
TECHNIQUES in
EXPRESSIONISM
 In painting, influenced by the
Fauves, Expressionism worked
with arbitrary colors as well as
jarring compositions. It was not
important to reproduce an
aesthetically pleasing impression
of the artistic subject matter; the
Expressionists focused on
capturing vivid emotional
reactions through powerful
colors and dynamic
compositions instead.
The Wild Beasts
Henri Matisse
Action painting takes advantage of quick, spontaneous,
emotional movements when applying paint to the canvas.
Color field painting creates distinct areas of color on the
canvas. 

The color appears to blend into the canvas, with color itself
being the subject.

Hard-edge painting is a technique that uses abstract

geometric shapes with strongly defined borders.
 VINCENT VAN
GOGH (1853-1890)
“SUNFLOWERS”
1888 – OIL ON
CANVAS.
 He used color to express his
feelings about a subject, rather
than to simply describe it. In a
letter to his brother Theo he
explained,

‘Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before my

eyes, I use color more arbitrarily to express myself forcibly.’
 EDVARD MUNCH
(1863-1994)
“THE SCREAM” 1893
– OIL, TEMPERA
AND PASTEL ON
BOARD.5
‘The scream’ is munch’s own voice
crying in the wilderness, a
prophetic voice that declares the
expressionist message, fifteen years
before the term was invented
 "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of
melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against
the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like
blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I
stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream
piercing nature."
 The scream (1893)

•  evidenced the conflict between

spirituality and modernity as a This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC

central theme of his work.

A message in ‘The Scream’ stumped historians for years. Now they think they
know the ‘madman.’
 Anxiety (1894)

•Is part of the body of

works that influenced the
start of expressionism
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC
 Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue
Rider)
• Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was not
exactly an Expressionist group, more a
meeting of diverse talents who contributed to
the publication of an almanac 'Der Blaue
Reiter' and two exhibitions of the same name
• The aim of Der Blaue Reiter exhibitions was
to highlight the similarities in different
approaches to creating art, for example,
finding common ground between the
AUGUSTE MACKE (1887-1914)
primitive and the contemporary. ‘Girls Under Trees’, 1914 (oil on
canvas)
 They outlined this objective in
the catalogue for the first
exhibition
'We do not seek to propagate any precise or particular
form; our object is to show, in the variety of the forms
represented, how the inner desire of artists realises itself
in multiple fashion.'
 WASSILY KANDINSKY (1866-1944)

Expressive abstraction 'Composition IV', 1911 (oil on canvas)

 This link between the visual and the aural
inspired his experiments with color as an
abstract element for the subject of a painting.

His paintings of this period are attempts to release this psychic

quality of color by freeing it from the task of describing
physical objects. In moving towards abstraction by breaking
down the boundaries of realistic forms, Kandinsky tries to
tap into the more expressive power of color as it exists in the
mind
 Kandinsky was the first artist to
push painting towards total
abstraction. He is quoted as saying
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It
demands that you know how to draw well, that you have
a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors,
and that you be a true poet. This last is essential."
 Reference:
• Wikipedia.com
• https://www.theartstory.org/movement/expressionis
• “Expressionism.” The Reader‘s Encyclopedia of World
Drama. John Gassner and Edward Quinn. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1969. Print.
• “Expressionism.” The Oxford Companion to American
Literature sixth edition. Phillip W. Leininger. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.
• Oskar Kokoschka. Expressionist Texts. New York: PAJ
Publisher, 1986. Print.
• “Expressionism.” The Cambridge Guide to Theater.
Professor James Brandon. New York. Cambridge
University Press. 1995. Print.

The Photos by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA