Expressionist paintings

Expressionist Paintings and Renowned Expressionism Artists

The most famous of all Expressionism artists is without a doubt Edward Munch, a painter who marked all generations with his famous Expressionism painting The Scream, of which some fifty versions exist. We must not, however, forget the pioneering works of Toulouse Lautrec (The Tattooed Woman) and Vincent Van Gogh (Wheatfield with Crows), who helped paved the way, through their use of colour and treatment of space, for this new pictorial trend, expressionist painting.

The heirs to Munch's work, the Die Brücke group, consisting primarily of Ernst Ludwig Kirschner, Erich Heckel, Otto Dix, George Grozs and Emil Nolde, were interested in primitive art and sought to express extreme emotions through color and energetic brush strokes. Their Expressionism paintings feature figures with faces marked by violence and fear (The Funeral), and disproportioned and deformed limbs (The Skat Players, Otto Dix) in dark and deathly settings.

Another group that spearheaded the expressionism painting movement was Der Blaue Reiter, followed on from the positions and novelties brought by Die Brücke, with a fundamental new approach to form, in which color gradually overtook the importance of lines to express an emotion gradually leading to the abstract. Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Auguste Macke, the main representatives of this expressionist painting group, took their inspiration from symbolism and romanticism and created a pictorial language based on the spirituality and superiority of the artist's creative thought.

The History of Expressionism and Expressionist Painting

Founded in the early 20th century, the Expressionist movement, which originated primarily in Germany, was both literary and artistic (painting, architecture, theatre, etc.). The term Expressionism was coined by the art historian and critic Wilhelm Worringer, who was the first to use it to describe this new trend in art.

In response to French Impressionism, in which the resounding reality and joviality of everyday life were the main subjects depicted on canvas, artists sought to transmit their contemplation through their expressionist paintings. Tackling themes such as death, obsession and fear, the canvas as catharsis became a place for outpourings of fears and feelings in the traumatic period experienced by Europe at the time (prescience of World War I).