Expressionism

Exhibited in painting, literature, film, architecture and music Expressionism is the term used to describe any art form that distorts reality to produce a highly emotional effect. A subjective art form, Expressionism is characterized by symbolic colours, distorted forms, a two-dimensional careless manner, and larger-than-life imagery. Acting as the opposite of Impressionism, it aims to reflect the artist’s psyche rather than the reality of the outside world.

With its roots in Germany and Austria, the German Expressionist movement emerged in 1905 when the Fauves’ celebration of colour was pushed to higher emotional and psychological levels and academic traditions were challenged. Established by such artists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, German Expressionism adopted the Fauvist style of bright colours, but added harsher outlines and tended to dwell on the more sinister elements of the human state of mind.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was also a chief instigator of Expressionism for the way he acted as a mouthpiece for trends in ancient art that were previously neglected. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzche argued his theory regarding the ancient dualism between two types of visual experience; the Apollonian and the Dionysian. According to Nietzsche this was a dualism between a world of the mind, order, regularity and refinement and a world of intoxication, chaos and ecstasy. While the Apollonian represented the well-thought-out ideal, the Dionysian represented individual artistic conception, derived from man’s subconscious. That said the basic characteristics of Expressionism were considered to be Dionysian, based on intense emotions rather than rational thought.

With the Fauves, African and medieval art, Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh acting as dominant influences, leading figures of the 20th century Expressionist movement include Heinrich Campendonk, Rolph Nesch, Franz Marc, Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Wassilly Kandinsky and Edvard Munch. There were also a number of Expressionist groups in painting including the Blaue Reiter based in Munich and Die Brucke in Dresden. In the latter part of the 20th century, the movement influenced the abstract expressionist movement which consisted primarily of American artists such as Jackson Pollack. Soon enough a group of artists in the American South developed a style known as Southern expressionism.
In the Australian art world Albert Tucker is regarded to be a pioneer of Australian Expressionism. Described to have “not dealt in prettiness, but unsettling truths”, the often difficult and confronting work of Tucker represents an overtly political nature, a frustration with the morality of society, and acts as a reactive response to his surrounding environment. Profoundly influenced by the horrors of war, the Depression and the idea of catching people in the act of life, Tucker sought to use his art to capture the true essence and savagery of the human condition.

Symbolism

Symbolism, by definition, means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express an allegorical meaning. With Symbolism playing an important role in religious art and psychoanalysis, it can be said that Symbolist painters used mythological symbols and dream imagery to create a visual language of the soul. The symbols used are not familiar emblems from popular iconography but intensely personal, private, esoteric and ambiguous references. 

Advocating the darker sides of Romanticism and Abstraction, the Symbolists showed an interest in the macabre, the mysterious and the morbid which was considered to be a phenomenon of the fin de siecle. As they believed that art should capture absolute truths that could only be accessed indirectly, Symbolists painted obscure images of nature, human activities and other elements of the real world in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner. 

As a trend that reached far geographically, there were several groups of Symbolist artists from all over the world. Some of the leading figures of the movement include the French artists Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon, Arnold Bocklin from Switzerland, the British Edward Burne-Jones, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and Jan Thodoor Toorop from the Netherlands. Symbolism reached several Russian and American artists such as Mikhail Vrubel and Elihu Vedder, and the Pre-Raphaelites were also regarded as contemporaries of the early Symbolists. 

Symbolism had a significant influence on many subsequent art movements including Modernism, Aestheticism, Expressionism and Surrealism. The work of the Symbolists directly impacted on the curvilinear forms of the contemporary Art Nouveau and Les Nabis movements and their exploration of dreamlike subjects is also seen to have acted as a precursor of the Surrealists. 

Neo-Impressionism

Neo-Impressionism outgrew the Impressionism. Many Impressionists in the years after 1880 began to reconsider their earlier approaches or make important adjustments to them. What many of them found objectionable in their earlier art was not its truth value but its lack of permanence. Despite the fundamental similarity of conception, later works differ from earlier works in two fundamental respects. The elements, especially the figures, are more solidly and conventionally defined, and composition is more conservative. They moved far from her early commitment to depicting only contemporary moments. This pattern of rejection and reform was originated by Georges-Pierre Seurat, who made use of a technique called pointillism (known as confettiism). This new technique is based on the skillful putting side by side touches of pure color. The brain then blends the colors automatically in the involuntary process of optical mixing. Other neo-impressionists include Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, Theodoor van Rysselberghe, and Henry Edmond Cross.

IMPRESSIONISM

IMPRESSIONISM was an art movement that started in the mid-19th century and rose to popularity in the last quarter of the century. The movement was inspired by a variety of factors, including anti-establishment, foreign/asian influences and a desire to paint modern life instead of academic subjects of history and mythology.

Anti-establishment artists such as Gustave Courbet, Jean Francois Millet and Rosa Bonheur had already started to paint real life images (Realism) instead of mythology, fantasy and historical topics, but they were still painting using traditional techniques of applying paint (applying the paint smoothly to the canvas and blending it to create a flat surface). Even artists like Edouard Manet (who began his career as a controversial realist but would later add impressionist touches to his work) tried to keep the surface of his canvas flat and smooth, a technique he eventually abandoned.

Manet’s work was instrumental to the start of impressionism, but it was not impressionism. It was identifiably realism, with a few ideas borrowed from Japanese prints. But it was not old Manet who would be the first impressionist. It was young Monet. Claude Monet exhibited his landscape “Impression: Sunrise” in the 1872 Paris Salon which provoked the art critic Louis Leroy to coin the term “Impressionism” in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

That term “Impressionism” soon took on its own meaning and Monet and his artist friends (who painted in similar styles) eventually created their own Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, which fared poorly but was followed by more exhibitions which started to gather more and more interest.

Eventually French Impressionism would fundamentally change European art as it inspired later movements (neo-impressionism, post-impressionism, etc), spread to other countries and overseas.

So much so that by the 1920s the early impressionists were almost forgotten due to the popularity of other art movements. Eventually in the 1950s Impressionism came back in vogue and Parisien art galleries became overwhelmed by tourists from overseas wanting to see French Impressionism.