Expressionism

In June 1905, in Dresden, four young architecture students — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl — abandoned their studies and founded an artists' group. They called it Die Brücke — "The Bridge" — because they thought of themselves as a bridge between past and future, between the bourgeois German culture they had been raised in and a new, raw, emotionally direct visual language they were trying to invent. Their manifesto was brief and uncompromising: "Anyone who reproduces, directly and without falsification, that which compels him to create, is one of us." They had read Nietzsche. They had read Dostoyevsky. They had looked at African and Oceanic carvings in the Dresden ethnographic museum and at Van Gogh and Munch and Gauguin in the dealers' galleries. They wanted painting that would howl.

In 1911, a parallel group emerged in Munich, with different temperaments but a shared ambition. Der Blaue Reiter — "The Blue Rider" — gathered around the Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky and the German painter Franz Marc, and included Paul Klee, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, and Alexei von Jawlensky. Where Die Brücke was raw, urban, sexual, and aggressive, Der Blaue Reiter was philosophical, spiritual, and oriented toward what Kandinsky called innere Notwendigkeit, "inner necessity" — the principle that the painter must paint what the soul demands and nothing else.

These two groups — Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter — together constitute what we usually call German Expressionism, though the impulse extended well beyond German borders. Austrian Expressionism (Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka) was sharper, more sexually explicit, more anxious — the imagery of pre-First-World-War Vienna at its most strained. Belgian Expressionism (Constant Permeke, Frits Van den Berghe) was darker and more peasant-rooted. Norwegian and Russian variants developed independently.

What did they share? A common conviction that European bourgeois civilization, by 1905, had built up so many layers of polite convention, optical correctness, and academic depiction that the inner life of the human being had been buried under it. The job of painting was to dig down to that inner life and surface it, by whatever distortions were necessary. If a face needed to be green to show despair, the face was green. If a sky needed to swirl with red to show terror, the sky swirled. If a forest needed to twist into menace, the forest twisted. Expressionism was not, in the technical sense, an abstract movement — most Expressionist paintings still depicted recognizable subjects. But it was the movement that established, more firmly than any before it, that representational fidelity was negotiable, and that emotional truth could override visual truth.

The political and historical pressure on the movement was enormous. The First World War devastated the original Expressionist generation — Franz Marc died at Verdun in 1916, August Macke at Champagne in 1914. The Weimar Republic that emerged from the war absorbed and transformed Expressionism into its most influential late form: Expressionist cinema (Fritz Lang's Metropolis, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) produced some of the most visually distinctive films ever made — angular sets, distorted shadows, anxious lighting, a visual world that was openly about feeling rather than realism. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they declared Expressionism Entartete Kunst — "degenerate art" — and held a notorious exhibition in 1937 mocking it. Many Expressionists fled. Many died. The movement, in its German center, was effectively destroyed.

But the visual grammar had already escaped, and it has shaped image-making ever since. The horror genre in film and graphic novel work directly from Expressionist conventions. Tim Burton's entire career is one long love letter to Caligari. Egon Schiele's anxious linework recurs throughout contemporary illustration. Every music video that twists the world into a visual metaphor for inner state, every contemporary children's book illustrator whose work pushes anatomy into emotion, every brand that uses jagged, hand-drawn elements to signal authenticity over polish — all of this is downstream of the painters who decided, in Dresden in 1905, that beauty was not the point.