Die Brücke in Dresden launched German Expressionism in 1905
Expressionism began as a Northern European modernist turn around 1900, twisting the visible world so feeling, not likeness, ruled the canvas. In Dresden in 1905, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner led four artists who formed Die Brücke; Munich’s Der Blaue Reiter followed in 1911. The label itself only settled firmly around 1913.
The style’s hallmark is a subjective lens that warps appearance to stir moods and ideas rather than record physical reality. Precursors ranged from Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and James Ensor to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1892), August Strindberg’s late plays, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction, and Sigmund Freud’s psychology. Critics sometimes stretch the word back to Matthias Grünewald or El Greco, yet it mainly names twentieth-century work reacting against positivism, Naturalism, and Impressionism. Paris’s School of Paris, named by André Warnod, gathered foreign-born Jewish painters such as Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall whose restless, tragic human subjects Yitzhak Frenkel linked to histories of persecution.
Die Brücke started in Dresden; some members later moved to Berlin. Der Blaue Reiter, named after Wassily Kandinsky’s 1903 painting, gathered Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and August Macke in Munich—together only about a year (1912). Kandinsky argued that simple colours and shapes could carry feeling, pushing him toward abstraction. Fauvist experiments in Paris with arbitrary colour also fed the German taste for jarring compositions that valued vivid emotional reaction over a pleasing visual impression.
Richard Murphy notes how hard a single definition is: Expressionism overlapped Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Dada, and challenging figures such as Kafka, Gottfried Benn, and Döblin could sound anti-expressionist. Still, early twentieth-century Germany remains the core, answering industrial cities by rejecting realist ideology. The movement stayed strong in Weimar Berlin and among Paris’s School of Paris painters. After World War II, figurative expressionism travelled widely; Willem de Kooning’s 1952 Two Women’s Torsos, made during his Woman series and shown at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953, shows how the impulse kept mutating into Abstract Expressionism. Michel Ragon and Walter Benjamin even likened Expressionism to Baroque, while Alberto Arbasino quipped that Expressionism throws violent insults Baroque manners would never allow.
Source: Expressionism
