Expressionism

• 1. Introduction

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  Expressionism wanted the world bent out of shape on purpose. The Czech art historian Antonin Matejcek, writing in 1910, said the goal plainly. An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself, rejecting immediate perception and building instead on more complex psychic structures. The mind acts as a filter, he wrote, stripping impressions of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence. Out came simple short-hand formulae and symbols. This was a modernist movement that began in poetry and painting in Northern Europe around the start of the 20th century. It presented the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically to evoke moods. How does a movement so committed to inner feeling become, at the same time, notoriously difficult to define? Why do its own greatest names sometimes reject the label? And how did a mainly German idea spread into film, dance, opera, architecture, and theatres across the world?

• 2. An Argument Over A Word

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  The word expressionist was used in the modern sense as early as 1850, but its firmer origins are tangled. One account traces it to paintings shown in 1901 in Paris by an obscure artist, Julien-Auguste Herve, who called them Expressionismes. Even then the term Expressionism did not firmly establish itself until 1913. Richard Murphy points to the deeper problem of pinning it down. The most challenging expressionists, he notes, such as Kafka, Gottfried Benn and Doblin, were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-expressionists. Part of the trouble is overlap, since the movement bled into Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism. Critics have tried to triangulate it against older styles instead. The art historian Michel Ragon and the philosopher Walter Benjamin likened Expressionism to Baroque. Alberto Arbasino drew the line between them in blunt terms. Expressionism does not shun the violently unpleasant effect, he said, while Baroque does. Baroque, in his phrasing, is well-mannered, and Expressionism throws some terrific insults that Baroque never would.

• 3. The Ancestors

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  Friedrich Nietzsche, who lived from 1844 to 1900, sits among the movement's important precursors, especially his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written between 1883 and 1892. The Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, who lived from 1849 to 1912, supplied later plays like the trilogy To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata. Frank Wedekind, who lived from 1864 to 1918, contributed the Lulu plays, Erdgeist, or Earth Spirit, and Die Buchse der Pandora, or Pandora's Box. The American poet Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass belong on the list too, alongside the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Painters did as much as writers to prepare the ground. The Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Dutch Vincent van Gogh, and the Belgian James Ensor each pushed feeling past appearance. The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who lived from 1856 to 1939, rounds out a roster of minds obsessed with what lies beneath the surface. The movement's emphasis on subjective perspective has been read as a reaction to positivism, and to styles like Naturalism and Impressionism.

• 4. The Bridge And The Rider

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  In 1905, four German artists led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner formed Die Brucke, the Bridge, in Dresden. This was arguably the founding organization of German Expressionism, though its members did not use the word itself, and some later moved to Berlin. In 1911 a like-minded group, Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, came together in Munich. Its name came from Wassily Kandinsky's painting Der Blaue Reiter of 1903, and its members included Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and August Macke. Die Brucke lasted longer than the Blue Rider, which held together for only a year. These painters absorbed Munch, van Gogh, and African art, and they watched the Fauves in Paris, whose arbitrary colours and jarring compositions echoed in their own work. They wanted vivid emotional reactions on the canvas through powerful colours and dynamic compositions, not a pleasing impression of the subject. Kandinsky believed simple colours and shapes could let a spectator feel the mood of a painting directly. That conviction pushed him steadily toward abstraction.

• 5. Paris And America

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  Andre Warnod gave the name Ecole de Paris, the School of Paris, to a group of expressionist artists in the city, many of them foreign-born Jewish painters. Among them were Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, Yitzhak Frenkel, and Abraham Mintchine, centered in the Montparnasse district. Frenkel described their expressionism as restless and emotional. They tended to portray human subjects and faces, drawing emotion from expression, and their art was characterized as dramatic and tragic. Critics tied that tragic quality to Jewish suffering after persecution and pogroms. Across the Atlantic, the reception was colder at first. Marsden Hartley met Kandinsky in Germany in 1913, and Katherine Sophie Dreier and Marcel Duchamp founded the Societe Anonyme in 1920 to bring modern art to New York. A real shift came only after the Munich exhibition Entartete Kunst in 1937. American museums began acquiring Expressionist works to present them as a resistant culture opposing an authoritarian regime hostile to freedom. Norris Embry, who lived from 1921 to 1981, studied with Oskar Kokoschka in 1947 and has been called the first American German Expressionist.

• 6. Mosquitoes On Stage

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  Oskar Kokoschka's 1909 playlet, Murderer, The Hope of Women, is often called the first expressionist drama. An unnamed man and woman struggle for dominance in it. The man brands the woman, she stabs and imprisons him, and after he frees himself she falls dead at his touch. As the play ends he slaughters everyone around him, in the text's own words, like mosquitoes. The German composer Paul Hindemith turned the play into an opera, which premiered in 1921. Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller became the most famous playwrights of this German theatre, joined by Reinhard Sorge, Walter Hasenclever, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Arnolt Bronnen. Many of these plays stage a generational war against authority, often personified by the Father. In Sorge's The Beggar, a mentally ill father raves about mining the riches of Mars before his son poisons him. In Bronnen's Parricide, the son stabs his tyrannical father to death, then must fend off his mother's frenzied sexual overtures. Some works followed an episodic shape called the Stationendrama, station plays modeled on the Stations of the Cross, a form Strindberg had pioneered in To Damascus.

• 7. Beyond The Canvas

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  Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released in 1920, stands among the defining works of Expressionist German cinema. Paul Wegener's The Golem came the same year, followed by F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu in 1922 and Fritz Lang's Metropolis in 1927. The look depended on distorted set design, chiaroscuro lighting, stylised acting, distorted camera angles, and superimposition. Some of those devices crossed into Hollywood, as in Murnau's Sunrise of 1927, and the term later attached to film noir cinematography and the films of Ingmar Bergman. Two Berlin journals carried the movement in print, Der Sturm, published by Herwarth Walden from 1910, and Die Aktion, edited by Franz Pfemfert from 1911. The term reached music around 1918, applied especially to Arnold Schoenberg, who avoided traditional forms of beauty and was himself an expressionist painter. Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg formed the Second Viennese School, and Berg's opera Wozzeck drew on Georg Buchner's play Woyzeck. Theodor Adorno wrote that the depiction of fear lies at the centre of expressionist music, its dissonance banishing the harmonious, affirmative element of art.

• 8. Walls That Feel

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  Bruno Taut's Glass Pavilion, built for the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition in 1914, is one of the few buildings firmly labeled Expressionist. Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam, completed in 1921, is another, and the interior of Hans Poelzig's Berlin theatre, the Grosse Schauspielhaus, designed for Max Reinhardt, is sometimes cited too. The architectural critic Sigfried Giedion dismissed all of this in his 1941 book Space, Time and Architecture, treating it as a footnote to functionalism. The idea found new life far from Germany. In Mexico in 1953, the German emigre Mathias Goeritz published his Arquitectura Emocional manifesto, declaring that architecture's principal function is emotion. The Mexican architect Luis Barragan adopted the term, and the two collaborated on the Torres de Satelite between 1957 and 1958. Expressionist architecture was re-evaluated more positively only during the 1970s, the same decade that saw Neo-expressionism rise as an international revival, a reminder that a movement built on inner feeling keeps finding new bodies to inhabit.