Expressionism
Expressionism emerged in Germany in the early 20th century as a forceful rejection of Impressionist naturalism. Where the Impressionists sought to record visual sensation faithfully, Expressionists distorted it — exaggerating colour, flattening form, tilting perspective — to project inner states of feeling onto the canvas. The movement coalesced around two groups: Die Brücke (The Bridge), founded in Dresden in 1905, whose members painted raw, angular figures charged with sexual tension and urban unease; and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), formed in Munich in 1911, which pursued a more spiritual abstraction. The Expressionist impulse also ran through the work of Viennese artist Egon Schiele and the Norwegian precursor Edvard Munch. With the rise of the Nazi regime, which condemned the style as "degenerate art," German Expressionism was brutally suppressed — but its legacy shaped nearly every major expressive tendency in 20th-century art.
Defining characteristics
- Distortion of form and space to convey emotion
- Bold, non-naturalistic colour as psychological language
- Angular, jagged line and flattened perspective
- Themes of anxiety, alienation, and urban modernity
- Influence of African and Oceanic art
- Spiritual and abstract aspirations alongside raw figuration
Die Brücke
Dresden-based group founded in 1905 whose raw, angular figures and vivid colour challenged academic convention.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1880–1938 · Founder
Co-founder and driving force of Die Brücke. Kirchner's urban scenes — jagged Berlin street figures, crowded cafés, and prostitutes — crackle with nervous energy and angular colour. He later retreated to the Swiss Alps, where psychological illness and Nazi persecution eventually drove him to suicide.
Street, Berlin (1913)
Oil on canvas · Museum of Modern Art, New York
Elongated, mask-like figures crowd a Berlin street, the city rendered as a place of cold anonymity and desire.
Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915)
Oil on canvas · Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin
Kirchner depicts himself with a severed hand — a psychological self-portrait of artistic impotence and war trauma.
Egon Schiele
1890–1918 · Key figure
Viennese artist whose contorted, emaciated figures express raw sexuality, vulnerability, and existential anguish. Schiele's searing line and deliberately unfinished surfaces made him one of the most intense draftsmen of the century. He died at 28 in the influenza pandemic.
Self-Portrait with Physalis (1912)
Oil on panel · Leopold Museum, Vienna
A gaunt, confrontational self-portrait characteristic of his unflinching psychological directness.
The Embrace (1917)
Oil on canvas · Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna
Two entwined figures rendered with his characteristic angular vulnerability.
Der Blaue Reiter
Munich-based group founded in 1911 that sought spiritual transcendence through abstraction and colour.
Wassily Kandinsky
1866–1944 · Founder
Russian-born painter who is widely credited with producing the first purely abstract works in Western art. Kandinsky believed colour and form could communicate spiritual truths directly, without reference to the visible world — a conviction he articulated in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911).
Composition VII (1913)
Oil on canvas · Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
The most complex of his pre-war Compositions — a turbulent, apocalyptic swirl of colour and form.
Yellow-Red-Blue (1925)
Oil on canvas · Centre Pompidou, Paris
A Bauhaus-period work exploring the spiritual and emotional properties of primary colours.
Franz Marc
1880–1916 · Co-founder
Co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter whose paintings of animals — horses, deer, foxes — pulsate with spiritual intensity through non-naturalistic colour. Killed at Verdun at 36, cutting short one of the most promising careers in German modernism.
The Large Blue Horses (1911)
Oil on canvas · Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Three blue horses in harmonious repose — Marc's signature blue symbolised spirituality and masculinity.
Fate of the Animals (1913)
Oil on canvas · Kunstmuseum Basel
A shattering vision of natural destruction, painted as if in premonition of the coming war.
Related movements
Post-Impressionism
1880s–1905
A broad term for artists who built on Impressionism but pushed toward structure, symbolism, and emotional expression.
Surrealism
1920s–1950s
A revolutionary movement that plumbed the unconscious mind, dreams, and irrational imagery to liberate human experience from rational constraints.
Abstract Expressionism
1940s–1960s
New York's post-war avant-garde that made the act of painting itself the subject, through gestural marks and raw emotion.