What is Expressionism

and how can I apply

my artistic skills in
making an
Expressionism
Artwork?
Expressionism developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Expressionism was opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in
Europe and emphasized artist's subjective emotion, which overrides fidelity to
the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were
frequently distorted, or otherwise altered. Landmarks of this movement were
violent colors and exaggerated lines that helped contain intense emotional
expression. Application of formal elements is vivid, jarring, violent, or
dynamic. Expressionist were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner
experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not
objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and
events arouse in them.

The expressionistic tradition was significantly, rose to the emergence

with a series of paintings of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh from the last
year and a half of his life. There was recorded his heightened emotional state.
One of the earliest and most famous examples of Expressionism is Gogh's
"The Starry Night." Whatever was cause, it cannot be denied that a great
many artists of this period assumed that the chief function of art was to
express their intense feelings to the world.

Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict

not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that
objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion,
exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent,
or dynamic application of formal elements. 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.

Unlike Impressionism, its goals were 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.

Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an

international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting
from certain medieval art forms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van
Gogh and the fauvism movement.

The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto
Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke,
Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred
Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement.
During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism
addict.

CONCLUSION
I therefore conclude that in Expressionist Art, the artist tries to express certain
feelings about something. The artists that painted in this style were more concerned
with having their paintings express a feeling than in making the painting look exactly
like what they were painting. Artistic styles of a person may vary. Sometimes a
person’s artistic skills are limited to what have they studied or practiced for a
long time. Some are much blessed to gain all adaptations for all those styles
of Arts.

RECOMMENDATION
Expressionism can be a good way to express your emotional feelings
and to interpret what is inside your mind especially when it is negative. You
may use this as a style of art when you are depressed or emotionally
incapacitated. It will also be a good help to Psychologists and Psychiatrists to
make their patients and clients to easily express and put up with confidence
their feelings and hidden grey matters It can be a way of breathing out
Loneliness, sadness, failures and rejections.
 SUBMITTED BY:
Heziel C. Frianeza
IV-Joule

SUBMITTED TO:
Mr. Cesar Cavinta