Expressionism for beginners: painting the inner storm

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Some art shows what the world looks like. Expressionism shows what the world feels like from inside: anxious, ecstatic, lonely, electric. In the years before the First World War, painters in Norway, Germany and Austria bent shapes and pushed colors until a street or a sky looked the way a heartbeat feels. Some of them were also seekers, and one of them wrote the most important book on spiritual art of the century.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The legends. Modern How we use these images now.

Munch’s scream

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893. Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Historical The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863 to 1944) painted The Scream in 1893; this version is in the National Museum in Oslo. He described the moment in his notes: walking at sunset, the sky turned blood red, and he felt a great scream passing through nature. The figure is not screaming so much as hearing. Munch worked in Berlin in the 1890s, in a circle that included the Swedish writer August Strindberg.

Die Brücke

Historical In Dresden in 1905, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and fellow students founded Die Brücke, “The Bridge”. They painted city streets, bathers and the tensions of modern life with jagged forms and acid colors, and revived the woodcut, inspired by medieval German prints and by African and Oceanic sculpture in ethnographic museums. They admired that sculpture, but knew almost nothing about its makers or meanings. Paula Modersohn-Becker, working in the artists’ village of Worpswede, painted peasant women, children and many frank self-portraits in simplified, monumental forms before her early death in 1907.

The Blue Rider

Franz Marc, The Riding School, 1913. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1984.1203.85). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical In Munich, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter, “The Blue Rider”, and in 1912 published an almanac under that name, mixing modern paintings with folk art, children’s drawings and Bavarian glass paintings. Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky’s partner, painted the village of Murnau in strong, simple color. Marc painted animals, blue horses and red deer, believing they lived closer to the spirit of nature than people did. This woodcut of 1913 turns a riding school into a whirl of forms. Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916.

The esoteric angle

Historical Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, dated 1912, argued that color and form act directly on the soul, like music. He named Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society as signs of a spiritual turning point. In Paris in the 1890s Strindberg tried to make gold in alchemical experiments, and told the story in his book Inferno (1897).

Later tradition In 1937 the Nazi regime mocked Expressionism in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. It drew around two million visitors. Many works were sold abroad or destroyed, and many artists fled. History is not always simple: Emil Nolde, whose works hung in the exhibition, was himself a member of the Nazi party, a fact long hidden and examined openly in a Berlin exhibition in 2019. The persecution of modern art was part of the persecution of people.

Modern The Scream became an emoji. I find that funny and a little sad. I follow Kandinsky’s spiritual path in lesson 7 of the course.

Try it yourself

Look at The Scream on the National Museum website. Cover the figure with your hand. Does the sky alone still feel anxious? Then cover the sky. What does the figure say without it?

Before and after

Before this: Fauvism.

After this: Cubism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.