Expressionism

This movement was characterized by artists’ sudden tendency to depict subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events, rather that objective reality. This movement emerged as an organized movement in Germany before World War 1. Colour drawing, and proportion were often exaggerated or distorted, and symbolic content was very important. Line and color were often pronounced and colour and value contrasts were intensified. Thickly layered paint, loose brushwork and bold contour drawing were used to achieve the desired tactile properties. Lithographs, woodcuts and poster were considered very valuable and important mediums by the expressionists.

Revolting against conventional aesthetic forms and cultural norms, expressionists felt a deep sense of social crisis. Many German expressionists rejected the authority of the military, education, government and Hohenzollen rule. They felt deep empathy for the poor and the social outcasts. These people became their most favoured subject for their work.  The expressionists’ belief in art as a beacon pointing towards a new social order and improved human condition was fueled by intense idealism.  

In Germany, where expressionism extended into theater, film and literature, expressionist artists split the movement into two groups:

*      Die Brücke (The Bridge) originated in Dresden in 1905

*      Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) originated in Munich in 1911

Expressionists constantly sought new approaches to art and life. Die Brücke artists declared their independence in transforming their subject matter until it conveyed their own unexpressed feelings whereas artists from Der Blaue Reiter redefined art as an object without subject matter, but with perceptual properties that were able to convey feelings.  Die Brücke’s figurative paintings and woodblock prints were forged with thick, raw strokes, often becoming bold statements about alienation, anxiety and despair.

Expressionists’ concern with the human condition and its representation in easily understood graphic imagery is outstandingly evident in drawings, prints, sculptures and posters by Kathe Schmidt Kollwits. She was married to a physician who ran a clinic for the working class in Berlin. Kathe gained first-hand knowledge of the working poor. She documented their plight in figurative works of great emotional power. Her posters convey a great sympathy from the suffering of the women and children that she documented.

Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, “The Survivors Make War on War!”poster, 1923.

 This powerful antiwar statement was commissioned by the International Association of 

Labor Unions in Amsterdam. 

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russion émigré, was one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter along with Paul Klee, a Swiss artist. Due to them being much less inclined to express the agony od the human condition, they sought a spiritual reality beyond the outward appearance of nature and explored problems of form and color. 

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 29, 1912. 
Kandinsky defined an improvisation as a spontaneous
expression of inner character having spiritual nature

Kandinsky led the group and so became the leading advocate of art that could reveal the spiritual nature of people through the orchestration of colour, line and form on the canvas. He compared colour and form to music and its ability to express deep human emotion. This belief in the autonomy and spiritual values of color led to the courageous emancipation of his paintings from motifs and representational elements.

Klee synthesized elements inspired by all the  modern movements as well as children’s and naïve art, achieving intense subjective power while contributing to the objective formal vocabulary of modern art.  His subject matter was translated into graphic signs and symbols with strong communicative power.

Paul Klee, Fish Magic, 1925.
Images are reinvented into potent signs. Color, form and texture are delicately
balanced into a cohesive composition, and the whole transmits a quiet poetry from
a world invented by the artist's imagination. 

The fauves (wild beasts), in France, were led by Henri Matisse. They shocked the proper French society with their jarring color contrasts and spirited drawing in the first decade of the century and were more involved with color and structural relationships than expressions of spiritual crisis.

The techniques and subject matter of expressionism influenced graphic illustration and poster art. The emphasis expressionists placed on social and political activism continues to provide a viable model for graphic designers addressing problems of the human condition and environment. Art from children, unschooled artists, non-European cultures and tribal art served as sources od inspiration to this movement. Theories about colour and form advanced by Kandinsky and Klee became important foundations for design and design education through their teaching at the Bauhaus.