Expressionism

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

At the end of the 19th century, this Expressionist spirit resurfaced in the paintings of two awkward and isolated personalities – one was the Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh and the other a Norwegian, Edvard Munch. While the Impressionists were admiring the colour 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. It was this 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.

Paintings like Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ (1888) opened our eyes to the intensity of expressive colour. He used colour 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 colour more arbitrarily to express myself forcibly.’ His heightened vision helped to liberated colour as an emotional instrument in the repertoire of 20th century art and the vitality of his brushwork became a key influence in the development of both the Fauves' and the Expressionists’ painting technique.

Munch’s painting of ‘The Scream’ (1893) was equally influential. It provides us with a psychological blueprint for Expressionist art: distorted shapes and exaggerated colours that amplify a sense of anxiety and alienation. ‘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."

Wassily Kandinsky

The Russian-born artist Vasily Kandinsky moved to Munich to study painting in 1896. There, he became one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), a loose association of artists formed in 1911 to promote a new art, one that would reject the materialist world in favor of the world of emotion and the spirit. 

Referances:

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/art%20movements/expressionism/van_gogh.jpg

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.70.1