EXPRESSIONISM. - This name designates an artistic movement which in the field of painting acquired a definiteness of orientations and programmatic manifestations at the beginning of our century in Germany. Such manifestations came about through the painters of the group known as "Die Brücke," founded in Dresden in 1903, which was followed by the "Berliner Secession" and the "Neue Secession."
However, certain works by the Norwegian Edvard Munch, painted in the last decade of the 14th century, already contain characteristic elements of what must be understood as the poetics of Expressionism, unless one wishes to recognize such elements, as some do, in the painting of van Gogh; but the antecedents are very numerous and distant and can also be connected to Oriental art, to Assyro-Babylonian sculptures, to the barbaric idols of the Negro tribes, and so on.
The poetics of Expressionism asserts conceptions clearly in antithesis to those of Impressionism (v.), which fights its battle in the name of sensible truth. In fact, Expressionism seeks to transmit, more than the impressions of the external and therefore objective world, the movements of the spirit — that is, subjective impressions — rendered by means of an exasperated vision of form, which is accentuated, that is deformed, in its characteristics so that the state of mind connected to those movements of the spirit may manifest itself in its crudeness. Thus the ancient laws of pictorial and plastic syntax are broken, and there follows the deformation of images that express, with marked signs and harsh colors, sentiments that are almost always violent or tragic, often turbid.
At the beginning of the present century the largest group of Expressionist painters can be identified in Germany among the members of the groups cited above; they are E. Heckel, E. L. Kirchner, K. Schmidt-Ruttluff, E. Nolde, M. Pechstein, A. Macker, H. Nauen. In France, among the numerous painters who can be designated as Expressionists, G. Rouault must be placed in the forefront. In Italy, apart from A. Modigliani, who lived almost always in France participating actively in the artistic movement of that nation in the first twenty years of the century, Gino Rossi, Gino Bonichi known as Scipione, and Lorenzo Viani can be connected, for certain aspects of their painting, to the Expressionist movement.
