In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
Expressionism itself was never a concerted or well-defined movement, no one individual connected with expressionism wrote a program or offered a theory that was binding for the entire “movement,†one work in particular exerted a powerful influence on many artists.
It can be said, however, that its central feature is a revolt against the artistic and literary tradition of realism, both in subject matter and in style.
The expressionist artist or writer undertakes to express a personal vision--usually a troubled or tensely emotional vision--of human life and human society. THIS IS DONE BY EXAGGERATING AND DISTORTING what, according to the norms of artistic realism, are objective features of the outer world, and by embodying violent extremes of mood and feeling. Often the work implies that what is depicted or described represents the experience of an individual standing alone and afraid in an industrial, technological, and urban society which is disintegrating into chaos.
Expressionist painters tended to use jagged lines to depict contorted objects and forms, as well as to substitute arbitrary, often lurid colors, for natural hues. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity. They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.
They used jagged, distorted lines; crude, rapid brushwork; and jarring colours to depict urban street scenes and other contemporary subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their instability and their emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety, disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response to the ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they discerned in modern life.
Expressionism sets out to achieve the greatest possible degree of expressivity. It is not beauty that dominates but emotion. The deformation of the image of nature to reflect intense expression and the use of strong colours are characteristic of expressionist painting.
It is not Impressionism which seeks to capture transient nature at different moments, to reflect the diversity of the physical world. The impressionist expresses certain things without the intervention of the mind. Impressionist art records momentary impressions, of landscapes, buildings, parks. Monet painted a church at various moments of the day, each time producing a different painting.
Unlike Impressionism, its goals are not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.
