Understanding Expressionism: Key Features & Masterpieces of the Movement

Expressionism is an art movement that prioritizes showing emotional truth and inner feelings over realistic representation. By distorting colors and figurative details, the Expressionist style communicates hard-to-grasp psychological states.

Van Gogh's swirling Starry Night, Munch's anxiety-filled The Scream, Kirchner's angular Street, Berlin, Kandinsky's vibrant Composition VII, and Schiele's raw, distorted self-portraits are all iconic examples of Expressionist paintings that reveal inner emotional states through augmented realism and intense color.

Expressionism (not to be confused with the later Abstract Expressionism movement) started informally in the 1900s when young artists were sensitive to uncanny changes lurking below the surface of modern life. No one could identify these changes by name, but everyone could FEEL them.

The promise of this large, looming presence—this new form of high modernism that rebelled against realism and fact—had already enlisted some of the most brilliant creative minds across Europe and Russia. Their individual efforts gave way to a new shared visual language. One that prioritized the truth of subjectivity over the uncertainty of reality.

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History and Development

Expressionism's introduction to the 20th-century art world was like Rumi's parable, "Elephant in the Dark." In this metaphorical poem, people who have never seen an elephant touch one in a pitch-black room and attempt to guess what they think it is.

Each person feels a different part—one touches the trunk and says "it's a snake," another feels the leg and says "it's the column of a temple," and so on. Everyone accurately describes their subjective experience, but it's just one part of the bigger picture. When the lights came on, everyone could see that it was something they couldn't have imagined: an elephant.

When Expressionist artists started, they weren't calling their work "Expressionism." They were reacting to the world around it and attempting to show how it made them feel.

More so than the artists from whom they took inspiration, Expressionism was characterized by its political awareness. The troubling events and highly charged atmosphere leading up to the tragedies of World War I are visually reflected in many Expressionist artworks. Even when their work doesn’t seem overtly political, Expressionist artists sought to convey their emotional response to the war and what led up to it. 

The Fauvism art movement, which took place almost simultaneously, offered an early stylistic influence that allowed German Expressionism to come into its own. And Post-Impressionist artists such as Van Gogh and Gauguin, as well as Cubist depictions of space as geometric, also inspired Expressionism to reimagine how reality could be responded to in art.  

Precursors and Early Influences of Expressionism (Late 19th–Early 20th Century)

Impressionism was a key art movement before Expressionism. It was popular, but young artists were craving something more unique.

Symbolism provided an early alternative to Impressionistic realism, but it was really the Post-Impressionists (such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin) who empowered Expressionist artists to reconsider pictorial space, and how it could become a record of pure emotion or emblematic detail.

Van Gogh’s gestural brushwork rubbed off on the emerging Expressionist painters. His use of impasto and his detailed color schemes, which seemed to highlight his own subjectivity, were only paralleled by Edvard Munch’s explorations of inner turmoil. Despite their technical differences, these artists shared a belief that a painting should reflect the personality of the artist as much as the content or themes being depicted. 

The Die Brücke Group: Founders of German Expressionism (1905–1920)

The Die Brücke group—a kind of forerunner to modern-day art collectives—laid the foundations for German Expressionism. They took influence from Impressionist art, but still rejected it as overly polished. Additionally, they welcomed new themes coinciding with emerging social attitudes towards modernity.

Based in Dresden, key figures of Die Brücke included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt‑Rottluff. These artists embraced peculiar colors, contrasts, gestural brushwork, and simplified forms to the level of hallucinating distortion.

They were also invigorated by the idea of collectivism as a way to bridge the gap between art and everyday life. By working across different media, their commitment to collectivism introduced German Expressionism to literature, theatre, and film.  

A little later, Der Blaue Reiter group emerged in Munich. Spearheaded by Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky and German-born Franz Marc, these artists not only shared an affinity for otherworldly color combinations, but saw in art a spiritual potential that could push back against the inhuman mechanisms of modernity.

On the precipice of World War I, these artists immersed themselves in abstraction: Kandinsky through a synaesthetic understanding of the relationship between color and music, and Marc through portraying animalistic figures as expressive types, instantly recognizable but loaded with symbolic meaning. These efforts occurred somewhat in tandem with the Cubist art movement.

French Influence

German Expressionism didn’t arise out of a vacuum. 

True to its international roots, even short-lived movements like French Fauvism were important precursors to Expressionistic techniques. Painters like Matisse simplified figures into almost total abstraction. Following Fauvism, early variants of what can be called French “Expressionism” leaned heavily on distorted forms, recreating depictions of everyday scenes through a subjective lens.

French artists such as Georges Rouault were key to this development. Developing in tandem with the German Expressionist movement—and even emerging a little earlier—Rouault also sought to convey emotion through the gestural intensity of his themes. 

Ultimately, French influences fed into emerging tendencies in Germany like streams into a river. European nations were more connected than ever before, and shared borders only aided communication between the two countries. So French artists contributed heavily to Expressionism’s early development.

Famous Expressionist Artists & Their Most Famous Works

Edvard Munch (Norway, 1863–1944)

One of the most iconic figure associated with Expressionism, it’s important to note that Munch’s works were originally associated with symbolism. What makes him an early Expressionist figure is his ability to take imagistic, almost poetic scenes, and transform them into meditations mortality, anxiety, and the sense of alienation intrinsic to the modern world.

Heavily influenced by his own psychological battles, Munch explored themes that were often considered too personal or sordid by artists in both the classical and modern art periods.

Munch’s legacy lives on today. The Scream (1893) is one of the most recognizable pieces of classic art, and works like The Dance of Life (1899–1900) and Madonna (1894–1895) introduced not only dramatic linework, draughtsman-like compositions, and morbid color combinations, but a brand of emotional unrest, existential dread, and psychological isolation all its own.

Egon Schiele (Austria, 1890–1918)

Egon Schiele, who died at the early age of 27 from tuberculosis, developed Expressionism towards themes of vulnerability, our consciousness of death, and the existential tensions inherent in modern life.

Inspired by the Vienna Secession group as much as Symbolism, his work often portrays figures in ambiguously vulnerable ways: with angular lines cut into the representation of their skin, bodies either exaggerated or emaciated, and hands depicted to look more humanoid than human. 

In works like Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant (1912), muted earth tones fill out the black outlines drawn around Schiele’s own face and the flowers in the background. Death and the Maiden (1915) and Seated Woman with Bent Knee (1917) similarly use morbidly contrasting colors to drive home the analogy between vitality and decay, beauty and mortality.

Franz Marc (Germany, 1880–1916)

Franz Marc was one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter. Like Kandinsky, Marc saw a higher, spiritual meaning in colors and shapes and often utilized a symbolic color scheme to depict animals and nature. 

Viewing animals not as subhuman or purely instinctive, but as intimately connected with nature in a way humanity no longer can be, works like Blue Horse I (1911) and The Yellow Cow (1911) celebrate these creatures as aspirational motifs juxtaposed by the removal of nature by industrialization. A somewhat later work, painted before Marc’s death at the Battle of Verdun, Fate of the Animals (1913) depicts the destruction of animal and natural life by modern weapons. 

Wassily Kandinsky (Russia/Germany, 1866–1944)

Wassily Kandinsky is another figure associated with Der Blaue Reiter. Like his colleague Franz Marc, he viewed colors and shapes as expressive of spiritual meanings, quite apart from what they revealed to the eye. In an effort to explore this theory, he pushed art further into the realm of pure abstraction than had ever been attempted before. 

In his pursuit of what he called “the spiritual in art,” works like Improvisation 28 (Second Version) (1912) and Composition VII (1913) use musical relationships—which can be heard, thought, and felt, but not seen—as a kind of foundation for his experiments with color, texture, and form.

Later, in works like Several Circles (1926), a relationship to musical harmonies and rhythm is still apparent, but the geometric abstraction and circular shapes are also a response to emerging artistic movements like Constructivism and the Bauhaus. 

Key Characteristics of Expressionist Art

Emotional Intensity

One of the key features of Expressionist art is the emphasis of inner feeling over realistic representation. 

This relates to numerous changes in Europe at the time—among them, the alienation fostered by emerging industrial trends, and the political and social antecedents that led up to World War I. In this landscape, feeling was a way of recovering an authentic sense of individuality against the instability of governmental power.  

The anxiety, alienation, and spiritual yearning associated with Expressionism tie in with these historical developments. Emphasizing gestural, individualized brushstrokes over academic technique, Expressionists were able to comment on their social situation without necessarily being a part of it. Art permitted them the liberty of commentary, allowing them to voice critical concerns without having to engage with politics directly. 

Bold, Non-naturalistic Colors

The use of intentional unrealism ties in with colors used in a symbolic, almost archaic or medieval way. Especially in works by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, the contrast between what the eye takes in on a daily basis and what it can perceive only through art takes on a heightened significance. 

The color psychology behind clashing palettes evoke particular moods that force viewers to reevaluate their relationship to reality—both artistic and political. 

Distorted Forms & Exaggerated Features

Borrowing from Fauvism, Cubism, and Post-Impressionism, Expressionist art became synonymous with objects and figures warped and distorted to heighten their emotional impact. 

The point was not so much to describe reality as to authentically respond to how the world felt at any given moment. The horrors of war slipped into this Expressionist mind frame like a knife through butter, and this abstract meaning is apparent in many of the most famous paintings from this time period.

Expressionist works depict space in a way that is neither mathematical (Cubist) nor brilliantly colorful (Fauvism). This is a deliberate strategy on the part of artists who want to capture the nuances of experiential space in terms of specific, often momentary, moods and attitudes.

Contrasting Textures & Brushstrokes

Like Fauvism and certain Post-Impressionist artists before them (especially Van Gogh), brushstrokes themselves became visible, energetic markers of a certain attitude toward life.

Between the gestural work of the artist, and the theme he was intent on capturing, a peculiar tension emerged that paved the way for new works of art rooted in individuality and the sheer sensation of being a modern human. This tension made surfaces appear raw and urgent in a way that reflected the collective unspoken attitudes of the era.

Embracing spontaneity, holding space for accidents or inaccuracies, and welcoming emotional intensity, the authenticity of personal truth became its own guarantee against academic ideals that valued harmony and balance. 

What Is Expressionism to You?

Expressionism's legacy lives on far beyond its early 20th-century origins. Its emotional intensity changed art forever, freeing artists to use color, shape, and line to express inner feelings rather than just copy what they saw. Look closely at contemporary art, film, or photography today—you'll spot Expressionism's DNA everywhere. In a world increasingly dominated by digital precision and filtered perfection, Expressionism's raw emotional honesty feels more relevant than ever. Its fundamental message still resonates: true art doesn't just show us how things look, but how they feel.