This lecture notes discusses "expressionism", a modernist movement notably in painting, film and literature that originated and developed Germany before and after the First World War.
Expressionism is a modernist movement notably in painting, film and literature that
originated and developed Germany before and after the First World War. This artistic
tendency can be considered as a form of resistance to bourgeois culture. The defining
characteristic of this artistic tendency is the attempt of the artist to present the world
solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to
evoke moods or ideas.
In art history, the term “Expressionism” refers to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul
Klee and others associated with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider, a name derived from the
title of Kandinsky’s painting of 1903) group which held exhibitions in Munich in 1911
and 1912. Heavily influenced by the Swiss critic Wilhelm Worringer’s comments on
“Abstraction” and rejecting both Impressionism and Naturalism, Expressionist painting
uses distorted lines and perspective and forms and bold colors to express raw emotion
and spirituality.
Although the Blaue Reiter group itself was short-lived, the Expressionist style became
extremely popular after the First World War, and influenced the later Neue Sachlicket
school, as well as the cynical portrayal of the Weimar Republic in Georg Grosz’s satirical
drawings, the photomontage of John Heartfield and the images of the modern city in
the “picture books” of uncaptioned woodcuts produced by the Belgian Frans Masereel.
The systematic distortion and introspection characteristic of the style resulted in its
being derided and banned as Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) by the Nazi regime.
Expressionist cinema is characterized by stark black and white contrasts, highly
theatrical sets and screenplays that deal with the supernatural and the diabolic. The
classic expressionist films are The Golem (1914, directed Paul Wegener and Henrik
Galeen) and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919, directed Robert Wiene), and the classic
study is Lotte H. Eisner’s The Haunted Screen. Expressionist cinema supplies the
iconography for many later horror films, such as the original Frankenstein (1931,
directed James Whale). Some of Brecht’s plays, such as Baal and Drums in the Night, are
sometimes described as expressionist but the most significant literary manifestation of
the tendency is Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which uses techniques pioneered
by James Joyce and John Dos Passos to paint a kaleidoscopic picture of Berlin.
The famous exchange between Ernst Bloch and György Lukács took place in the pages of
Das Wort (The word), an expatriate literary journal published in Moscow between 1936
and 1939. Ostensibly about expressionism, it is in fact a very broad debate about the
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