Tänzerin und Liegende after Auguste Dominique Ingres by August Macke
Dominant Curve by Wassily Kandinsky
The Large Blue Horses by Franz Marc
Red and Blue Horses by Franz Marc
Native Americans on Horses by August Macke
Landscape with Flowers by Zoltán Palugyay
Girl with a White Dog by Lucian Freud
Two Human Beings. The Lonely ones (The Reinhardt Frieze) by Edvard Munch
Beach by Edvard Munch
Untitled by Jean-Michel Basquiat
Slave Auction by Jean-Michel Basquiat
River Construction Landscape by Paul Klee

Expressionism

70 artists · 1905–1930

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Expressionism[4] emerged in Germany at the start of the twentieth century as a direct rejection of Impressionism's concern with surface appearance. Where the Impressionists recorded light, the Expressionists recorded feeling. They distorted form, flattened space, and pushed colour beyond any naturalistic function to make inner states visible on canvas. The movement coalesced around two groups. Die Brucke (The Bridge), founded in Dresden in 1905 by four architecture students led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, sought raw emotional directness through angular line, woodcut aesthetics, and anti-academic technique. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), formed in Munich in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky[11] and Franz Marc[14], pursued a more spiritual and abstract programme, linking colour to metaphysical meaning. Between these poles, independent figures such as Edvard Munch[13] in Norway, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka[12] in Vienna, and Kathe Kollwitz in Berlin extended Expressionism's reach across media and geography. The First World War shattered the movement's early idealism. Post-war Expressionism, in the hands of Max Beckmann and others, turned darker and more politically charged. By 1930 the movement had largely dissolved into successor styles, but its core principle, that art should express interior truth rather than mirror external reality, became one of modernism's defining legacies.

Key Ideas

  • Inner Necessity Over Outer Appearance

    Expressionism's founding idea was that a painting should communicate the artist's psychological and emotional state rather than describe what the eye sees. Kandinsky codified this as inner necessity in his 1911 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art. He argued that colour and form carry inherent spiritual properties. This was a decisive break from both academic realism and Impressionist empiricism.

  • Colour as Emotional Language

    Expressionists treated colour as an autonomous force. Franz Marc assigned emotional values to individual hues: blue for masculinity and austerity, yellow for feminine joy, red for violence. Kirchner and Die Brucke used clashing, non-naturalistic palettes to generate visual tension. Nolde built entire compositions from hot, saturated pigment applied in thick, rapid strokes. This approach had roots in Van Gogh and Gauguin, but the Expressionists pushed it further, severing colour from descriptive duty.

  • Primitivism and the Search for Authenticity

    Die Brucke looked to non-Western art, medieval woodcuts, and folk traditions as antidotes to what they saw as the exhaustion of European academic painting. They carved wooden sculptures inspired by African and Oceanic objects. Their printmaking was deliberately rough and direct. This was a strategic return to what they considered more honest modes of expression, uncorrupted by bourgeois taste.

  • Distortion and the Body

    The human figure in Expressionist art is rarely at rest. Kirchner elongated his figures into jagged silhouettes. Schiele stripped the body to sinew and bone. Kokoschka painted portraits with X-ray intensity. Kollwitz used the etching needle to gouge grief into the bodies of mothers and workers. This consistent deformation of anatomy was the movement's central formal strategy: the body as a vessel for states that polite representation could not contain.

  • War, Trauma, and Political Reckoning

    The First World War transformed Expressionism. Marc and Macke died in combat. Kirchner suffered a breakdown. Beckmann emerged from the trenches with a style hardened into angular, claustrophobic compositions. The utopian spirituality of Der Blaue Reiter gave way to unflinching depictions of post-war chaos. In the Weimar years, Expressionist aesthetics infused theatre, cinema, and architecture before the Nazi regime condemned the movement as degenerate art in 1937.

Key Artists

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch

1863–1944 · Norwegian

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat

1960–1988 · American

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

1866–1944 · Russian

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud

1922–2011 · Germany / Britain

Paul Klee

Paul Klee

1879–1940 · Swiss

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

1887–1985 · French

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani

1884–1920 · Italian

Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz

1867–1945 · German

Related Movements

Explore adjacent traditions and influences.

Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism

1880–1910

Fauvism

Fauvism

1904–1910

Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism

1943–1965

Progression of Art

Landmark works that shaped the movement.

The Scream by Edvard Munch

The Scream

Edvard Munch · 1893 · Tempera and crayon on cardboard

Munch painted The Scream years before Die Brucke or Der Blaue Reiter existed, yet it became Expressionism's most recognisable image. A figure on a bridge, mouth open, hands clamped to its skull, set against swirling red and orange bands. Munch drew the image from a specific experience: a diary entry described walking near a fjord when the sky turned blood red and he felt an infinite scream passing through nature. The landscape participates in the scream. The undulating lines of sky, water, and bridge echo the figure's open mouth. The Scream established the template: subjective feeling made visible through distorted form and heightened colour.

Street, Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Street, Dresden

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner · 1908 · Oil on canvas

Kirchner's early street scene captures the nervous energy Die Brucke channelled into urban subjects. Pedestrians crowd a narrow street, reduced to angular shapes with thick dark outlines. The palette is aggressively non-naturalistic: pink and green flesh, blue shadows on yellow pavement. The influence of the Fauves is visible, but the psychological edge is distinctly German. The Fauves celebrated colour for its sensual properties; Kirchner weaponised it. His street scenes treat the modern city as a site of alienation and overstimulation.

Dance Around the Golden Calf by Emil Nolde

Dance Around the Golden Calf

Emil Nolde · 1910 · Oil on canvas

Nolde pushed colour to maximum intensity. Three women dance before the golden idol, their bodies arched in hot reds, oranges, and yellows against dark ground. The brushwork is slashing and rapid. Nolde had joined Die Brucke briefly in 1906 but left after eighteen months, preferring to work alone. His religious paintings of 1909-1912 treated sacred subjects with the same raw emotionalism others brought to street scenes. The dancers' ecstatic abandon is both condemned and celebrated in the same gesture.

Composition VII by Wassily Kandinsky

Composition VII

Wassily Kandinsky · 1913 · Oil on canvas

Kandinsky completed this enormous canvas (200 by 300 cm) in four days after producing more than thirty preparatory studies. It is one of the earliest large-scale works to sever almost all ties to recognisable subject matter. Swirling masses of colour, black linear elements, and geometric fragments collide across the surface. Kandinsky's theoretical framework argued that painting could achieve the same non-representational emotional impact as music. Composition VII is his most ambitious attempt to prove this. The work marks the outer boundary of what Expressionism could achieve while still engaging with emotional content.

The Fate of the Animals by Franz Marc

The Fate of the Animals

Franz Marc · 1913 · Oil on canvas

Deer, horses, and foxes are caught in a landscape tearing itself apart. Diagonal shards of colour slice across the animals' bodies. Marc wrote on the back: Und alles Sein ist flammend Leid (And all being is flaming suffering). He had assigned spiritual significance to animals, believing them purer than humans. The painting was damaged by fire in 1916 and partly restored by Paul Klee. Marc himself was killed at Verdun that year, aged thirty-six. The Fate of the Animals reads as both personal prophecy and broader statement about fragility in an age of industrial violence.

Street, Berlin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Street, Berlin

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner · 1913 · Oil on canvas

Two women stride along a pavement, their elongated forms sheathed in fashionable clothing, their faces mask-like. Male figures hover at edges, furtive and predatory. Kirchner used anti-naturalistic colour throughout. The two central women are prostitutes, figures Kirchner returned to as symbols of the modern metropolis where everything, including intimacy, was transactional. The painting is both a document of pre-war Berlin nightlife and an expression of anxiety as Die Brucke's communal idealism collapsed.

The Bride of the Wind by Oskar Kokoschka

The Bride of the Wind

Oskar Kokoschka · 1914 · Oil on canvas

Kokoschka painted this self-portrait with his lover Alma Mahler during the final months of their relationship. Two figures lie in what appears to be a boat adrift in a storm. Alma sleeps peacefully; Kokoschka stares into darkness, awake and rigid. The paint surface blurs the boundary between figures and surroundings, as though wind is dissolving them. At 181 by 220 cm, the canvas is monumental, yet the subject is entirely private. It captures the collision between personal emotion and historical catastrophe.

The Night by Max Beckmann

The Night

Max Beckmann · 1919 · Oil on canvas

Three intruders have forced their way into a cramped domestic interior. A man is being hanged by one arm while another twists his wrist; a woman has been assaulted. The figures are packed into a compressed space with no escape route. Beckmann flattened the composition deliberately, using angular, interlocking forms and a cold green palette. He called it a modern history painting. It marks the point where Expressionism's pre-war interest in emotional intensity met post-war reality of political violence and social collapse.

Origins

Roots in Rebellion: From Impressionism to Inner Vision

Expressionism grew from dissatisfaction with the direction painting had taken since the 1870s. Impressionism had liberated colour and brushwork, but its focus on optical sensation struck a younger generation as insufficient. Van Gogh loaded canvases with emotional intensity. Gauguin sought a more authentic visual language. Munch turned the landscape into a projection of psychological states. By 1905, the idea that painting should communicate inner experience rather than transcribe appearances was already in the air.

Die Brucke: The Bridge from Dresden to Berlin

Kirchner, Bleyl, Heckel, and Schmidt-Rottluff founded Die Brucke in Dresden on 7 June 1905. All four were studying architecture with no formal painting training. This was deliberate. Their early programme drew heavily on woodcut printmaking, whose rough surfaces suited their appetite for directness. Nolde joined briefly in 1906; Pechstein and Mueller came later. In 1911, most relocated to Berlin. The group dissolved acrimoniously in 1913.

Der Blaue Reiter: Colour, Spirit, and the Almanac

Der Blaue Reiter formed in Munich in December 1911 when the Neue Kunstlervereinigung rejected a painting by Kandinsky. He and Marc withdrew and organised their own exhibition. The group's identity was defined by the Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), which juxtaposed Bavarian folk art, African masks, children's drawings, and contemporary paintings. Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art gave the group an intellectual framework. The circle included Munter, Macke, Klee, Werefkin, and Jawlensky. The war ended the group: Marc and Macke were killed, Kandinsky returned to Russia.

After the War: Fragmentation and Legacy

The Expressionism that survived the war was different. Beckmann developed angular, compressed compositions depicting urban violence. Kollwitz channelled personal grief into prints addressing poverty and bereavement. In cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) translated Expressionist distortion into set design. By the mid-1920s, many former Expressionists moved toward Neue Sachlichkeit. The Nazi regime's 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition attempted to erase the movement. It failed. Expressionism's insistence on making interior experience visible became foundational for Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism.

In Their Words

“I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I stopped and leaned against the fence, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
Edvard Munch, Diary entry, 22 January 1892
“Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911
“We both liked blue, Marc horses, I riders. So the name came by itself.”
Wassily Kandinsky, Recollection of naming Der Blaue Reiter, 1912
“Art will liberate itself from the needs and desires of men. We will no longer paint a forest or a horse as we please or as they seem to us, but as they really are.”
Franz Marc, Aphorisms, Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, 1912

All Expressionism Artists

65 artists.

Recommended Reading

  • German Expressionism: Art and Society

    German Expressionism: Art and Society

    Stephanie Barron and Wolf-Dieter Dube · 1997

    Comprehensive survey linking visual arts to theatre, film, and architecture within political context.

  • Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art

    Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art

    Dietmar Elger · 2007

    Broad single-volume overview covering major and lesser-known artists.

  • Concerning the Spiritual in Art

    Concerning the Spiritual in Art

    Wassily Kandinsky · 1911

    Kandinsky's foundational treatise on colour, form, and spiritual experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What is Expressionism?
    Expressionism[4] was a German-speaking movement that emerged before the First World War and peaked between 1910 and 1925, using distorted form, jarring colour and psychological intensity to depict inner emotional states rather than external appearance. The movement had two main groups: Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden from 1905 and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich from 1911.
  • When did Expressionism start?
    Die Brücke was founded on 7 June 1905 in Dresden by four architecture students: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl. Der Blaue Reiter formed in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky[11] and Franz Marc[14] after they broke away from the New Artists' Association. Precursors include Edvard Munch[13]'s 1890s Norwegian paintings and the late work of Vincent van Gogh.
  • Who are the most famous Expressionist artists?
    Die Brücke was led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, with Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. Der Blaue Reiter brought in Wassily Kandinsky[11], Franz Marc[14], August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter and Paul Klee[15]. Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka[12] led the Austrian wing, and Max Beckmann, though formally independent, is often grouped with the broader movement.
  • What defines Expressionism?
    Expressionist paintings use distorted figures, non-naturalistic colour, slashing brushwork and flattened perspective to carry emotional content. Common subjects include urban alienation, sexuality, spiritual yearning, war and portraiture pushed toward the grotesque. Kirchner's Berlin street scenes, Kandinsky's early abstract paintings and Schiele's anguished nudes show the three main directions the movement developed.
  • What is the difference between Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter?
    Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905 to 1913) worked in a collective studio, shared models and developed a raw primitivist idiom drawn from African and Oceanic sculpture and medieval woodcut. Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911 to 1914) was more intellectual, with Kandinsky's writings pushing toward spiritual abstraction and Marc's paintings toward symbolic animal subjects. The Munich group dissolved when its leaders were separated by the First World War.
  • Why was Expressionism important?
    Expressionism[4] established the twentieth-century equation between painting and psychological interiority, anticipating Abstract Expressionism by four decades. Kandinsky's 1912 book On the Spiritual in Art laid out a case for non-representational painting that is still cited. The movement was declared 'degenerate' by the Nazis in 1937, and the Entartete Kunst exhibition toured looted Expressionist works as examples of what the regime opposed.
  • Where can I see the best Expressionist paintings?
    Berlin's Brücke Museum preserves the densest Die Brücke holding. Munich's Lenbachhaus holds the canonical Blaue Reiter collection. The Leopold Museum in Vienna houses the world's largest Schiele collection. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg round out the essential public holdings.

Sources

Expressionism editorial draws on the following published scholarship.

  1. [1] book Stephanie Barron and Wolf-Dieter Dube, German Expressionism: Art and Society, 1997 Used for: political views, stylistic analysis.
  2. [2] book Dietmar Elger, Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art, 2007 Used for: biography, political views, stylistic analysis.
  3. [3] book Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis, technique.
  4. [4] wikipedia Wikipedia: Expressionism Used for: biography.
  5. [5] book guggenheim-expger00neug Used for: biography.
  6. [6] book Carol Strickland and John Boswell, The Annotated Mona Lisa _ba crash course in art history from prehistoric to post-modern _cCarol Strickland and John Boswell Used for: biography.
  7. [7] book Carol Strickland and John Boswell, The Annotated Mona Lisa _ba crash course in art history from prehistoric to post-modern _cCarol Strickland and John Boswell_1 Used for: biography.
  8. [8] book Carol Strickland and John Boswell, The Annotated Mona Lisa _ba crash course in art history from prehistoric to post-modern _cCarol Strickland and John Boswell_2 Used for: biography.
  9. [9] wikipedia Wikipedia: Amedeo Modigliani Used for: biography.
  10. [10] wikipedia Wikipedia: Theo van Doesburg Used for: biography.
  11. [11] wikipedia Wikipedia: Wassily Kandinsky Used for: biography.
  12. [12] wikipedia Wikipedia: Oskar Kokoschka Used for: biography.
  13. [13] wikipedia Wikipedia: Edvard Munch Used for: biography.
  14. [14] wikipedia Wikipedia: Franz Marc Used for: biography.
  15. [15] wikipedia Wikipedia: Paul Klee Used for: biography.

Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-05-23. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.

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