Expressionism

 Expressionism developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Expressionis was opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe and emphasized artist's subjective emotion, which overrides fidelity to the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted, or otherwise altered. Landmarks of this movement were violent colors and exaggerated lines that helped contain intense emotional expression. Application of formal elements is vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic. Expressionist were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in them. 


Vincent Van Gogh => The expressionistic tradition was significantly, rose to the emergence with a series of paintings of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh from the last year and a half of his life. There was recorded his heightened emotional state. One of the earliest and most famous examples of Expressionism is Gogh's "The Starry Night." Whatever was cause, it cannot be denied that a great many artists of this period assumed that the chief function of art was to express their intense feelings to the world.

Wikipedia:" In architecture, two specific buildings are identified as Expressionist: Bruno Taut's Glass Pavilion of the CologneWerkbund Exhibition (1914), and Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany completed in 1921. The interior of Hans Poelzig's Berlin theatre (the Grosse Schauspielhaus), designed for the director Max Reinhardt, is also cited sometimes. The influential architectural critic and historian Sigfried Giedion, in his book Space, Time and Architecture (1941), dismissed Expressionist architecture as a part of the development of functionalism. In Mexico, in 1953, German émigré Mathias Goeritz, published the "Arquitectura Emocional" (Architecture emotional) manifesto with which he declared that "architecture's principal function is emotion".^[56] Modern Mexican architect Luis Barragán adopted the term that influenced his work. The two of them collaborated in the project Torres de Satélite (1957–58) guided by Goeritz's principles of Arquitectura Emocional. It was only during the 1970s that Expressionism in architecture came to be re-evaluated more positively. "

Library Source: Expressionism in Art/ Cheney's


"Expressionist artists speak often of the purification of the means of the art: a stripping away of the accretions of insensitive eras, and a sifting of the remaining basic elements for characteristic expressiveness. Isadora Duncan stripped away courtly ornament and literary purpose- as well as masquerade costume- from the dance: purified the art for direct expression of the body in rhytmic movement." <85>


"Expressionism: paintings expressive in ways unrecognized by the Realists and literalists. It seems to this writer that there is no other word that so obviously describes the varied anti-Realistic achievement of contemporary and recent artists: an achievement constituting the main stream of Modernism. Therein is the answer to the chapter's title question. It remains only to shape our working definition of Expressionism, in the light of this broad expressiveness." <92>

The Scream by Edvard Munch