German Expressionism

German Expressionism is an art movement of the 1910–1930 period. The gallery holds 93 works in this movement, including works by Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Browse German Expressionism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

German Expressionism was a cultural movement that emerged in the years before the First World War, as a generation of young artists rejected the polished naturalism of academic painting and the optical detachment of Impressionism in favour of raw emotional and spiritual expression. It crystallised around two groups. Die Brücke ("The Bridge") was founded in Dresden in 1905 by architecture students Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, who sought to forge a "bridge" to a freer art and later moved to Berlin. Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider") formed in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, publishing its celebrated almanac in 1912. Both fed on the anxieties of rapid urbanisation and a wider European mood of cultural crisis.

Visually the movement is defined by intensity rather than accuracy: non-naturalistic, often clashing colour; distorted, angular figures; flattened space; and bold, visible brushwork. The Brücke painters revived the woodcut, whose jagged contrasts of black and white became emblematic of the style, while drawing on Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Fauvism and the so-called "primitive" art they admired in ethnographic museums. Where Brücke pursued a nervy depiction of the modern city, nudes and the self, Der Blaue Reiter moved toward lyrical abstraction and a search for spiritual content, as in Marc's symbolic animals and Kandinsky's pioneering near-abstractions.

The canon runs from Kirchner's electric Street, Berlin (1913) and Marc's apocalyptic Fate of the Animals (1913) to the work of Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, August Macke, Otto Mueller and the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose elongated figures translate the aesthetic into bronze and stone. Edvard Munch stands as a crucial Norwegian precursor, and Max Beckmann, though later allied with Weimar-era New Objectivity, carried Expressionism's emotional charge into the interwar decades.

After 1918 the movement's mood of alienation and social criticism shaped Weimar culture, theatre and film, before the Nazi regime condemned it as "degenerate": some 15,550 modern works were purged from German museums, and the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich on 19 July 1937. Many artists were defamed, exiled or silenced. Yet German Expressionism endured, profoundly shaping later figuration and feeding directly into Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism.