EXPRESSIONISM- A SIMPLE MEANING

Expressionism is an art movement that came into being when artists became more concerned with expressing their feeling on an occurrence or object than with creating a photo realistic painting.  Expressionism occurred mostly in Germany and sometimes it is called “German Expressionism” instead. Expressionist artists used exaggerated colors, aggressive brush strokes, exaggeration and distortion to paint.

Key features of Expressionism:• Expressionist artist used strong emotional colours

and wild brush strokes.• The stressed irrationality of the world, the natural

and the social world• The world of the supernatural was a strong

influence, of ghosts, magic, monsters, strange things happening, to mythic tales, etc.

• Individual alienation from the natural world and from the social world — The individual does not feel like they belong in either the social world or the natural world and are alone and abandoned.

• The impact of industrial, capitalist society on human beings.

SOME FACTS:

Expressionist artists also used German and Nordic folk myths and art techniques, of the European Middle Ages, of between 1000 — 1453.

These produced by carving images on wood, the wood is inked and pressed onto paper. This prints rough images with very strong, strange angles.

They also used art techniques and ideas of non-European art, such as African and Asian arts.

SOME FACTS- CONT.

The First World War was an obvious influence on expressionist art.

WHAT THEY AIMED AT? Expressionist artists wanted to paint very

strong emotions, sometimes crazy emotions, more than real objects as we see them in the world. They wanted to paint wild emotions and the world of dreams.

The expressionists argued that as real life was contradictory, then the arts need to be contradictory to reveal that too; that they needed to represent a contradictory, alienated and insane world.

NOW, BACK TO EDVARD MUNCH!!

WHO? Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863,

and was raised in Christiania (known as Oslo today).

When he was five his mother died. When he was 14 his sister died.

Was raised by father who suffered from mental illness.

He decided to become a painter at the age of 17.

He had his first private exhibition in 1889, the same year his father died.

WHAT? From about 1892, to 1908, Munch split most of

his time in Paris and in Berlin; it was in 1909 which he decided to return to his hometown, and go back to Norway.

During this period, much of the work that was created by Edvard Munch depicted his interest in nature, and it was also noted that the tones and colors that he used in these pieces, did add more color, and seemed a bit more cheerful.

From this period, up to his death, Edvard Munch remained in Norway, and much of his work that was created from this period on, seemed to take on the similar, colorful approach which he had adopted, since returning home in 1909.

HOW? A majority of the works which Edvard Munch

created, were referred to as the style known as symbolism. 

Many of Munch's works depict life and death scenes, love and terror, and the feeling of loneliness was often a feeling which viewers would note that his work patterns focused on.

FAMOUS WORKS!!THE SCREAM, 1893

THE DAY AFTER, 1894-95 

MADONNA, 1894

INFLUENCESImpressionist Artists:- Claude Monet Edouard Manet Post- Impressionist Artists:- Van Gogh Paul Cezzane Gauguin

And suprisingly, Sigmund Freud.

THE SAD PART Edvard Munch passed away in 1944, in a

small town which was just outside of his home town in Oslo. 

A total of 15,400 prints were donated, 4500 drawings and water color art was donated, and six sculptures which Edvard Munch had created, were all turned over to the Oslo government, and were used as display pieces in many locations.

Munch Museum of Art was created by the Norwegian Government.

SOME QUOTES: Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it

also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one

cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.