EXPRESSIONISIM

1905 – 1933
EUROPE (GERMANY)

Symbolist currents in late 19th century art influenced Expressionism the most. The
Expressionists were primarily influenced by Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor,
who encouraged the distortion of form and the use of powerful colors to portray a variety of
concerns and yearnings. The Expressionist movement's classic phase spanned from 1905 to
1920, and it swept across Europe.
 Expressionist artists frequently used swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly produced
brushstrokes. These approaches were intended to express the artist's turgid emotional
state in response to the modern world's fears.
 In the 20th century, Expressionist artists developed a powerful mode of social criticism in
their serpentine figural renderings and bold colors.

 Neo-expressionism - is a late modernist or early postmodern school of painting and

sculpture that first appeared in the late 1970s.
 Abstract Expressionism - in the 1940s and 1950s, American painters such as Jackson
Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning developed new kinds of abstract art
known as abstract expressionism.

ART EXAMPLES

The Scream
by Edvard Munch (1893)
(LEFT PICTURE)

Der Blaue Reiter

by Wassily Kandinsky (1903)
(RIGHT PICTURE)
 Mad Woman
by Chaim Soutine (1920)

FAMOUS ARTIST

Edvard Munch is a Norweigan painter and printmaker. He is an artist that paints about human
mortality such as chronic illness, sexual liberation, and religious aspiration. He expressed these
obsession through works of intense color, semi-abstraction and mysterious subject matter.

He grew up in a household where he was plagued with life-threatening illnesses on a regular

basis, as well as the premature deaths of his mother and sister. This powerful matrix of random
tragic events and their fatalistic interpretation left an indelible impression on the young artist,
influencing his subsequent interest with themes of anxiety, emotional agony, and human frailty.

BORN – December 12, 1863 (Loten, Norway)

DIED – January 23, 1944 (Oslo, Norway)
Wassily Kandinsky is a Russian painter, and he used the compelling interplay of color and form
to create an aesthetic experience that involved the public's eye, hearing, and emotions.
His visual vocabulary developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representational
canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late,
geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color.

Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians
could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds, while he also viewed non-objective,
abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey
universal human emotions and ideas.

BORN – December 4, 1866 (Moscow, Russia)

DIED – December 13, 1944 (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)

Oscar Kokoschka is an Austrian painter, printmaker, draftsman, sculptor, poet and playwright.
He moved daringly from a more decorative style into a bold, racy Expressionism. His freedom
from stylistic constraint as well as his belief in the power of art to raise awareness of
contemporary problems set an example for artists from the Abstract Expressionists in the mid-
20th century to the Neo-Expressionists of the late-20th century.

His penchant for portrait painting and self-portraiture was unique among the Expressionist
because he was less concerned about portraying the physical features, and was more
interested in capturing their, and his, inner psyche through exaggerated features, gestures and
brush strokes.

BORN – March 1, 1886 (Pochlarn, Austria)

DIED – February 22, 1980 (Montreux, Switzerland)

CUBISM
1907 – 1922

Cubism arose from a period of rapid experimentation between Pablo Picasso and Georges
Braque following Pablo Picasso's stunning 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Multiple vantage
points were used by these artists to fragment images into geometric patterns. Figures were
shown as dynamic configurations of volumes and planes where background and foreground
intermingled, rather than as sculpted shapes in an illusionistic world.

Artists working in the Cubist style moved on to explore with sculpture and include aspects of
collage and popular culture into their paintings. A number of artists adopted Picasso and
Braque's geometric faceting of objects and space including Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, along
with others that formed a group known as the Salon Cubists.

 Cubists experimented with open form, piercing figures and objects by allowing space to
flow through them, mixing background and foreground, and presenting objects from
different perspectives, this is called the first phase of the movement “Analytic Cubism”.

 In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubism practicioners explored the use of non-
art materials as abstract signs. Their use of newspaper would lead later historians to
argue that, instead of being concerned above all with form, the artists were also acutely
aware of current events, particularly World War I.

ART EXAMPLES

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

by Pablo Picasso (1907)
(LEFT PICTURE)

Houses at L’Estaque
by Georges Braque (1908)
(RIGHT PICTURE)

Violin and Palette

by Georges Braque (1909)
 FAMOUS ARTISTS
Pablo Picasso is a Spanish draftsman, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In the first part
of the 20th century, he was the most powerful and influential artist. He is most known
for co-founding Cubism with Georges Braque, but he also pioneered collage and made
significant contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism.

He was always eager to place himself in history. Picasso had an eclectic approach to
style, and while his work was usually characterized by a single dominating technique at
any one moment, he frequently switched between styles - sometimes even within the
same artwork.

BORN – October 25, 1881 (Malaga, Spain)

DIED – April 8, 1973 (Mougins, France)

Georges Braque is a French painter, collagist, draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor.

Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism.
Braque's work throughout his life focused on still lifes and means of viewing objects
from various perspectives through color, line, and texture. While his collaboration with
Pablo Picasso and their Cubist works are best known, Braque had a long painting career
that continued well beyond that period.

Braque used papier collés, a pasted paper collage method devised by Picasso and
Braque in 1912, to achieve balance and harmony in his compositions. He stenciled letters
onto paintings, blended pigments with sand, and copied wood grain and marble to achieve great
levels of dimension in his paintings.

BORN – May 13, 1882 (Argenteuil, France)

DIED – August 31, 1963 (Paris, France)

Sonia Delaunay is an Urkainian-born French painter, textile designer, fashion and

costume designer. Sonia was one of the primary propagators of Orphism (a movement
founded by her husband Robert), a theory wedding color to form in order to achieve visual
intensity on the surface of the canvas, the couple used Orphism to create non-objective
imagery.

Besides designing, making, and selling garments in her own fashion boutique, she was
responsible for costume design in a range of the performing arts including theatre and
dance. She ended up creating a line of textiles so significant that it was picked up by one
of the biggest fabric manufacturers in Europe.

BORN – November 14, 1885 (Odessa, Ukraine)

DIED – December 5, 1979 (Paris, France)
 FUTURISM
1909 – 1944
ITALY

Futurism was invented, and based in Italy. It is led by the charismatic poet Marinetti. The
group developed a number of novel techniques to express speed and motion, including blurring,
repetition, and the use of lines of force.

The characteristics of futurism are a focus on the technical progress of the modern machine
age, dynamism, speed, energy, vitality and change, also the group made some of the new
technologies they depicted in their art including advancements in mass media, printing, and
transportation.

Like the Fascists, the futurist were strongly patriotic, excited by violence and opposed to
parliamentary democracy.

ART EXAMPLES

The City Rises

by Umberto Boccioni (1910)
(LEFT PICTURE)

Dancer at Pigalle
by Gino Severini (1912)
(RIGHT PICTURE)

The Cyclist
by Natalia Goncharova (1913)

FAMOUS ARTIST
Umberto Boccioni an Italian painter, sculptor, and theoretician. He was one of the most
prominent and influential artist among the Italian Futurist. Boccioni later later produced
some significant Futurist sculpture. He died while volunteering in the Italian army, aged
33, and making him emblematic of the Futurist celebration of machine and violent
destructive force of modernity.

Boccioni was first matured as a neo-impressionist painter, not until he encountered

cubism that he developed a style that matched the heart of Futurism.

BORN – October 19, 1882 (Reggio Calabria, Italy)

DIED – August 17, 1916 (Sorte, Italy)

Natalia Goncharova is a russian painter, writer, set and costume designer, and
illustrator. From an influential, wealthy, and musical family, the artist's own interests lay
with Russia's rural workers and by seeming contradiction, with a cast of otherworldly
characters. In her paintings, peasants portrayed in the throws of their labor - cutting
hay, shaving ice, washing, and weaving - are imbued with monumental dignity

She too painted religious scenes as 'gifts from above' that materialized intuitively
following ongoing devotional dialogue with the Lord.

BORN – June 21, 1881 (Nagaevo, Tula Province, Russia)

 DIED – October 17, 1962 (Paris, France)

Gino Severini an Italian painter, mosaicist, wirter, and set designer. He was one of the
most progressive of all 20th century Italian artist. Severini was "reborn" through his new
commitment to the Catholic faith which saw the artist produce religious mosaics so
finely skilled they earned him the title: "Father of Modern Mosaics".

Severini joined a pan-European group of artists and intellectuals in his support for the
interwar "Return to Order" movement. Severini's later career saw him bring renewed
interest and credibility to the ancient art of Byzantine mosaics. Having contributed
retro-imperial walkways for Mussolini's bloated architectural edifices, he worked under
the influence of a new spiritualism that saw him visualize Christian parables for churches
in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.

BORN – April 7, 1883 (Cortona, Italy)

DIED – February 26, 1966 (Paris, France)