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Definition: expressionism from Philip's Encyclopedia

Style of art in which naturalism is replaced by exaggerated images to express intense, subjective emotion. The term is often used in relation to a radical German art movement between the 1880s and c.1905. The inspiration for this new focus came from many different sources, including the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch and those within symbolism, as well as from folk art. German expressionism reached its apogee in the work of the Blaue Reiter group. The term also applies to performance arts, such as the works of Strindberg and Wedekind.

expressionism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Style of painting and sculpture that expresses inner emotions; in particular, a movement in early 20th-century art in northern and central Europe. Expressionist artists tended to distort or exaggerate natural colour and appearance in order to describe an inner vision or emotion; the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch 's Skriket/The Scream (1893; National Gallery, Oslo) is perhaps the most celebrated example. In expressionism, it is considered more important that the work depicts the subjective, personal emotions accurately, than that the subjects drawn are an accurate, external presentation of reality. Despite this one, unifying motivation behind expressionism, there is no single, particular style associated with the movement. Other leading expressionist artists were James Ensor , who employed vivid colours in his images of grotesque masks and skeletons, Oskar Kokoschka , Egon Schiele , and Chaïm Soutine . The groups die Brücke and der Blaue Reiter were associated with this movement, and…
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Full text Article Expressionism

From The Harvard Dictionary of Music
A movement in German visual art and literature of the early 20th century. The term is sometimes applied to Germanic music of the period, especially that of Schoenberg and his school. The expressionists believed that art should reflect the inner consciousness of its creator: rather than produce a…
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Full text Article EXPRESSIONISM

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
A term for modern art movements that reject both ‘academic’ art and the overly controlled forms of impressionism that replaced traditional representation. In painting, its great proponents are Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Vassily Kandinsky, the painters of the Blaue Reier (‘Blue…
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Full text Article EXPRESSIONISM

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Expressionism refers to an avantgarde movement in the arts in Germany from approximately 1910 to 1920 that developed first and most prominently in the visual arts (painting, sculpture, lithographs, and woodcuts) before spreading into the verbal arts (drama, poetry, and prose fiction), as well as…
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Full text Article Expressionism

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
In the visual arts, artistic style in which the artist depicts not objective reality but the subjective emotions that objects or events arouse. This aim is accomplished through the distortion and exaggeration of shape and the vivid or violent application of colour. Its roots are found in the works…
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Full text Article Expressionism

From A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
(c. 1895) (This concept is so unsympathetic to me that I fear misrepresentation, but here goes.) The central assumption is that, through the making of a work, the artist transfers his or her emotions and feelings, customarily anguished, to the viewer/reader. Such art is judged “expressive” to the…
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Full text Article expressionism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Style of painting and sculpture that expresses inner emotions; in particular, a movement in early 20th-century art in northern and central Europe. Expressionist artists tended to distort or exaggerate natural colour and appearance in order to describe an inner vision or emotion; the Norwegian…
| 852 words
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Full text Article expressionism

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
term used to describe works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision. The expressionist transforms nature rather than imitates it. In painting and the graphic arts, certain movements such as the Brücke (1905), Blaue Reiter (1911), and…
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Full text Article EXPRESSIONISM

From 100 Ideas that Changed Film
Employing exterior or objective representation to convey interior or subjective states, the silent Schauerfilme (horror films), Kammerspielfilme (chamber dramas), and Strassenfilme (street films) produced in Weimar Germany between 1919 and 1929 continue to have a major influence on world cinema. …
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Full text Article expressionism.

From The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting
An umbrella term for modernist tendencies across numerous art forms in the early twentieth century, expressionism refers to an explicitly anti-naturalistic, avant-garde aesthetic that sought to transgress reality through alternative, revelatory artistic visions. Rejecting realistic illusion as much…
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Full text Article expressionism

From The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance
A broad aesthetic term that has been applied to any portrayal of intense emotion, especially in the visual arts, but in the theatre refers more usefully to a movement originating in Germany in the early twentieth century. Reacting against the limited and untheatrical nature of *naturalism , the…
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