Expressionismus

German Ausdruck (expression, pressing-out) combined aus (out) with Druck (pressure, print). Expressionism as a term emerged in German-speaking art criticism around 1910-1911, initially to describe the work of German and Austrian painters who were distorting color, line, and form to convey emotional and psychological states rather than optical appearance. The word distinguished their approach from French Impressionism, which focused on the impression of light on the eye. Expressionism looked inward.

The Norwegian Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) was the founding image — a figure on a bridge, mouth open, sky writhing, the world itself convulsed by the figure's anguish. The distorted colors, the flowing lines, the visible anxiety: this was not how the bridge at Ekeberg looked but how Munch felt standing on it. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Dresden group Die Brücke (The Bridge, founded 1905) extended this into German urban life — angular, harsh, figures in cafes and streets rendered with anxious lines.

Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and other Austrian Expressionists pushed further: bodies distorted, twisted, raw; sexuality and death made equally uncomfortable. Schiele's self-portraits from 1910-1912 showed a figure flayed by self-examination, bones visible through the skin of the brushwork. Viennese psychoanalysis and Viennese painting were conducting the same investigation simultaneously.

The movement ended violently: in 1933 the Nazi regime declared Expressionist art 'degenerate' (Entartet) and confiscated and destroyed thousands of works. The 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich displayed 650 confiscated works as examples of artistic degeneracy — and drew over two million visitors, more than any exhibition in German history. Expressionism survived, emigrated, and fundamentally shaped American Abstract Expressionism and the entire postwar artistic tradition.