Expressionism

EXPRESSIONISM

expressionism definition

An aesthetic style that leaves from the assemblies of authenticity and naturalism and looks to pass on inward encounter by misshaping instead of straightforwardly speaking to characteristic pictures. The profoundly particular dreams imparted in the artworks of Vincent van Gogh are punctual illustrations of expressionism. Edward Munch and Georges Rouault are acknowledged expressionist painters.
 

Characteristics of Expressionism Art

Expressionism art has existed long before the term was applied to art in the early 20th century. Nonetheless, Expressionism generally refers to a series of art movements that share a common interest in depicting emotions and emphasizing subjectivity, frequently through the use of vivid coloration and dynamic or distorted forms in paintings. Each movement pushed the art form in a slightly different direction but, on the whole, they all share these characteristics.

Emotions And Feelings: Expressionism's defining characteristic is its attempt to describe emotions and feelings visually. This might be through a portrait that exaggerates certain features of a face to make it seem more expressive, or it could be through vibrant and contrasting colors in a room to create an overall mood. In contrast, non-Expressionist art would avoid distorting shapes, colors and lines so that it could display physical reality more accurately.

Subjectivity: Some non-Expressionist art relies on color and shape distortion to create an enhanced sense of reality; the art of the New Objectivist painter is a prime example. However, their work is still intent on displaying the external or "objective" world as clearly as possible. Expressionistic art, on the other hand, tends to display an artist's internal, subjective experience to the world, whether it is a depiction of a dream, an improvised abstraction, or a highly stylized painting of a street scene that the artist has imbued with his own interpretation.

Vivid Coloration: In contrast to the Impressionists, who saw color as a reflection of light-and thus a representation of the physical world-Expressionists view color as an emotional device. Expressionistic paintings tend to employ vivid colors to elicit emotional reactions from the viewer or to relay the deep emotional state of the artist.

Dynamic And Distorted Forms: Most Expressionistic paintings, when depicting images of recognizable objects like humans or horses, render them in exaggerated forms, frequently with a sense of movement through blurred edges or curving brushstrokes. Even abstract paintings employ this kind of dynamism, showing a fluidity of line and movement throughout the painting.

Characteristics of Movements Within Expressionism: Each movement within Expressionism has had its own distinct style. Art of the Fauves (Wild Beasts), including that of Matisse, was intensely colored with distorted shapes balanced into compelling compositions, but they remained fairly representational. German Expressionism continued this highly stylized approach but delved strongly into abstraction and improvisational compositions, particularly in the work of Wassily Kandinsky. Abstract Expressionism expanded the canvas and employed an "all over" approach to creating large-scale, highly abstract paintings.
 

Different types of images on Expressionism:-

In Literature

In literature, expressionism is often considered a revolt against realism and naturalism, seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than record external events in logical sequence. In the novel, the term is closely allied to the writing of Franz Kafka and James. In the drama, Strindberg is considered the forefather of the expressionists, though the term is specifically applied to a group of early 20th-century German dramatists, including Kaiser, Toller, and Wed kind. Their work was often characterized by a bizarre distortion of reality. Playwrights not closely associated with the expressionists occasionally wrote expressionist drama, e.g., Karel Capek's R.U.R. (1921) and Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1921). The movement, though short-lived, gave impetus to a free form of writing and of production in modern theater.

The Beginnings so the Expressionistic Tendency

            Just when Europe was witnessing a birth of romanticism in the plays o Rostand, D’ Annunzio, Banally, Stephen Phillips, and Von Hosfmannsthal, the beginnings of the Expressionistic tendency were making themselves felt Strindberg, who had been a symbolist in Lucky peer was in the dream play, the spook sonata the two parts of the dance of life and the three parts of towards Damascus blazing new dramatic trails and the three parts of towards Damascus blazing new dramatic trails and abandoning naturalism. Furthermore and this was particularly important in the light of what followed he was turning to the dream as a theatrical device suited to his new aims. it was not, of course, the boary old dream trick which so many plays had made familiar. No longer did a leading character, who was sipping a whiskey and soda before a roaring fire in a wainscoted room, doze off, at the end of the first act, into a sleep which found him a knight at round table in the second, and awake in the third. The dream was now to be used not as means for such Connecticut Yankee characters but as a legitimate spring board to the unedited, uninhibited wanderings of the mind. It was now to become a psychological instead of fairytale device.

            Strindberg and Wedekind, the wedekind of Erdgeist, pandora’s Box and the awakening of spring, with his earth. spirit, his impatience with an over-literary world, and his frank delineation of passion and sex, were the precursors in Russia, Andreyv and evereinov followed, Andreyev with such a symbolic fable of the cycle of existence as the life of man, or, much later, such reaching for philosophical truth as he who gets Stapped or The Taltz of the Dogs : Everinov with the idea of momo-drama and such plays as the theatre of the sol, or such a masked comedy of appearances and illusion as the chief thing.

            German ontribution

            It was in Germany, however, and particularly in the Germany of war and postwar days that Expressionism assumed the staccato scene sequence which is usually associated with its name. associated with its name. The works of Kaiser, Toller, and haasenclever offered new examples of construction more marked in their temdencies and aggressive in their individuality than the first steps of the forerunners had been, definite enough in fact to warrant the tag which their common characteristics won for them. They came as dramas of disillusionment, of social unrest and tormented mortals. Depending as a rule on only a few indicative properties and

out-cuts picked out by sharp shafts of sight which stabbed the darkness of stages surrounded by black curtains, their simple production-demands were, no doubt, conveniently adapted to the financial capacities of an improverished Germany. But it must not be supposed that they were only the children of poverty. Instead, they were the offspring of human and artistic discontent, born of rich zest of adventure children of the purse. And in such a swift, concentrated biography as Kaiser's from mom to midnight: such dramas of rebellion as Toller’s man and the masses and the machine wreckers-so different as they are from the external approaches to class conflicts of an earlier day like Hauptman’s the weavers or Galsworthy's Strife.

Expressionism in France

            Postwar France also felt the tidal wave of protest, the reaction against the old clichés. To a theatre that was as dead and sterile as that to which Antoine had once brought the breath of life, came a new generation of playwrights, men like pellerin, Gantillon, and lenor mand, pelerine, who wrote tetes de rechanges in which a man leaves for dinner as one individual oly to find on reaching his destination theat he has been separated into six different and distinct persons; Gantillon, who in maya found a symbol of illusion in the person of a Marseilles prostiture because she was a different woman to each man who sought her out, fashioned in the image of his particular need or desire; and lenormand who in the failures told with an unswerving directness the poignan; story of the misfortunes which overtake a tenth rate actress and her authorhusband who follows her on the road, such in stances picked at random from a crowded list are typical, nothing more. nor were france and germany the only countries to react to the new tendencies.

Expressionism of America

America, too, the America of the skyscraper and the jazz age, the land of machinery, pf standardization and vaudelille, the saxophone and the blues, with a thousand native rhythms and a tempo of life peculiarly suited tosuch acceleration and distortion responded to the new impulse, so far, the most notable results have been seen in the vivid, simultanceous, ommiscient flashes of biography; hay which john howard lawsons roger bloomer realed, and in the strident, vaudeville insistency of that same mr. lawsons professional in the sordid tragedy of a Guy and a jane that francis Edwards faragoh set against the pushing, impersonal background of new York in pinwheel: in some of the fine, singing moments of hohn dos passes, the moon is a gong; in the earlier half of elmer rice’s stingingly satirical the adding machine; and in such familiar examples as Eugene o’Neill’s the Emperor jones and the hairy ape.
 

Conclusion

Regardless of the slim merits of many of the plays built in the image of Expressionism, and even of the faults of monotony and obscurity which often mar the best of them, these dramas come as tokens of revolt, they too are attempts to throw down the old plastering that as Hugo said, “conceals the façade of art “ and must always conceal it for each new generation until it has found a medium of expression true to itself and native to its own time, they are attempt to break from the “well made play” they speak from the mind of a new day, using its idiom, catching something of its rhythm, answering some of its needs, and following the pace it sets for them.