expressionism (art)

Style of painting and sculpture that expresses inner emotions; in particular, a movement in early 20th-century art in northern and central Europe. Expressionist artists tended to distort or exaggerate natural colour and appearance in order to describe an inner vision or emotion; the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's Skriket/The Scream (1893; National Gallery, Oslo) is perhaps the most celebrated example.

In expressionism, it is considered more important that the work depicts the subjective, personal emotions accurately, than that the subjects drawn are an accurate, external presentation of reality. Despite this one, unifying motivation behind expressionism, there is no single, particular style associated with the movement. Other leading expressionist artists were James Ensor, who employed vivid colours in his images of grotesque masks and skeletons, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Chaïm Soutine. The groups die Brücke and der Blaue Reiter were associated with this movement, and the expressionist trend in German art emerged even more strongly after World War I in the work of Max Beckmann and George Grosz.