The 19th and 20th centuries saw a breakthrough in Eurocentric art history. Artists began to search for individual means of expression, in a desire to defy the rigid rules of academism. This, in a nutshell, is how revolutionary impressionism was born – a pioneering trend that opened the floodgates to other innovative artistic experiments and changed the face of art history forever, yet only lasted 20 years! So what is the story behind the emergence of Impressionism? What is the movement with a similar name – Expressionism?

In the following article, we will try to help you understand the fundamental differences between the two eponymous movements – Impressionism and Expressionism – and answer the question of why Impressionism was so important and revolutionary for art. We invite you to read.

Historical context.

Let’s go back in time to 19th century France. There is the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded back in the reign of Louis XIV, which educates the next generation of outstanding painters. The initial ideas behind the establishment of the Academy were quite noble. The establishment of an educational art institution was intended to help with the nepotistic inheritance of the rights to become an artist, so that the profession was no longer strictly dependent on ancestry. From the outset, education at the Royal Academy was based on a strict academic doctrine, characterised by Renaissance iconography and a love of ancient models of ideal beauty.

The Academy had a few ironclad principles:

• The preferred themes of the works: portraiture, genre scenes, scenes from mythology, the Bible or nudes. The moral message of the work was also important.
• The artist should paint his paintings in the studio.
• An interesting painting subject was man and his body, and it was best to imitate ancient sculptures to become a worthy artist.
• Colour should be subdued, reflecting reality.

These rules, as one can easily guess, were not in keeping with the spirit of the times and the need for individual artistic expression, but it was difficult for young artists to ‘step outside’ the academic framework. Artists exhibited only in the so-called le Salon, where members of the Academy acted as juries.

Impressionism.

As a result, it was necessary to organise an exhibition in its own right. The photographer Nadar, who was a friend of the Impressionists and the first photographer of such legends as Clémenceau, Baudelaire, Zola, Delacroix, Sand, Rodin and Jules Verne, had his studio perfectly situated near the official Salon. In order to raise funds, he offered intrepid artists the opportunity to rent his space. Paul Durand-Ruel, a marshal associated with some of the artists, offers to finance part of the costs involved in organising the event.

Finally, in 1874, an exhibition organised by the Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, Graphic Artists, etc., took place in Paris, which marked the beginning of the Impressionist movement. The founding members of this group included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Their main commonality was their independence from the official annual Salon, where a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected works of art and awarded prizes. Despite their differences in approach to painting, in style and technique, the independent artists were seen as a grouping. Although conservative critics criticised their work for its unfinished, sketchy appearance, more progressive writers praised them for their depiction of contemporary life – Edmond Duranty, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (New Painting), described their way of presenting contemporary subjects as revolutionary in painting. The painters avoided naming this movement or school, although some of them later adopted the name by which they were known – the Impressionists.

The exhibition included Claude Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), which gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or ‘impression’ rather than a finished painting.

Jules Castagnary wrote in the journal Le Siècle :

‘If we want to characterise them with the word that characterises them, we will have to coined the new term impressionists. They are impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape but the impression given by the landscape. ’

Stylistic features of the Impressionists.

How did the Impressionists paint? What accounted for their revolutionary nature?

• Because of the advances in science at the time and the understanding of what light is, the Impressionists used only the seven colours of the rainbow and pioneered the mixing of paints directly on the canvas, rather than on a palette like their predecessors.
• Impressionism was not concerned with any metaphysical considerations. It focused on the moment, the ephemeral, the mood, the lighting and the point of view. It represented the culmination and final stage of a vision of painting based on the foundations of the Renaissance, particularly Renaissance perspective and the perceptual habits developed using it [Wikipedia]. At the same time, however, he undermined the dogmas of this vision by proving the subjectivity and relativity of human perception, making colour and form autonomous elements of a painting, so that it no longer mattered what the painting represented, but how it was painted.
• The subject matter of the paintings also changed. Biblical, historical, mythological and romantic themes were rejected in favour of the mundane and the everyday. Artists were interested in movement, in people during ordinary activities, playing, relaxing. They also often showed the appearance of a place in a certain lighting or how its appearance changed during different times of the day.

• Nature was also a motif in their works, and as a result they favoured plein air painting.
• The Impressionists’ creative technique was divisionism – layering patches of pure colour side by side in such a way that, from a distance, the paints merged to form complementary colours. They painted shadows by mixing primary colours, avoiding the use of black. Divisionism, however, did not become a binding rule, as the Impressionists never formed a formal group that clearly defined their assumptions and creative methods. As a result, the principle was applied more or less precisely.

Expressionism.

While Impressionism emphasises sensibility and impressionism, Expressionism means expressio – expression, expression, expression.

History of Expressionism.

As an artistic movement, Expressionism usually refers to the schools of emotional and interpretive art of the late 19th century and early 20th century, which emerged in Germany as a reaction to passive Impressionism. The word ‘expressionism’ first appeared in 1850, mainly in reference to paintings in which the artist’s strong emotions were clearly depicted. The term gained popularity after Antonin Matějček concretised it in 1910. The art historian used the word to denote the opposite of Impressionism and to indicate one of the more important currents in art that expressed the highly personal and spontaneous self-expression characteristic of many artists of the time. While the Impressionists sought to emphasise the majesty of nature and man through painting, the Expressionists, according to Matějček, were driven by the desire to express their emotions about what they saw.

Expressionism first appeared in 1905, when a group of four German students led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner founded the group Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. Its founders were Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and its members were Paul Klee and August Macke. These two groups became the foundation of the German Expressionist movement. Since then, Expressionism has become a widely recognised form of modern art.

Expressionism made its debut in 1905 when Ernst Ludwig Kirchner took the initiative with three other German students, founding the group Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden. A few years later, in 1911, a group of artists with similar values founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich, consisting of artists such as Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee and August Macke. These two groups became the foundation of the German Expressionist movement, which in time became a widely recognised form of modern art.

Stylistic features of Expressionism.

• A protest against the imitation of reality, the Constructivist tendencies in Cézanne’s art, the aim of extreme subjectivism in the expression of artistic feelings.
• According to Herwarth Walden, the painter depicts what he perceives in the deepest layers of his own consciousness, expressing himself, where transient reality is only a symbol, involving himself in the process. This reflects the deep self of the artist. According to Herbert Kühn, in the case of Expressionism, there is a deep gulf between what is to be depicted and the object itself, where the depicted object is not a simple projection of what it presents, but an invitation to understand what it actually represents.
• A liberation from and reconstruction of an imposed external reality,
• Catastrophism and existentialism, references to the philosophy of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bergson,
• the use of suggestive colour, often in contrasting juxtapositions, active textures, exposing the graphic skeleton of the composition and deformation that highlights ugliness.
• Often the form is more important than the content of the image.
• According to the journal Die Weissen Blätter, Expressionism is characterised by concentration, economy, great power, carefully composed form and pathos expressing inner tension. Exaltation, deformation, paroxysm and intense colours are also prominent.

German Expressionism.
Die Brucke.

The artists associated with the ‘Die Brücke’ art movement sought to express emotion through colour and form in their works. They rejected the traditional rules of perspective and realistic proportions, focusing instead on deformations and colours as an expression of the artist’s inner feelings and his subjective view of the world.

Der Blaue Reiter – the blue rider.

The name Der Blaue Reiter was chosen because of the artistic interests of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, who valued horses, riders and the colour blue. The group’s symbol, the Christian soldier St George, was a choice representing their values and faith. The Blue Rider symbolised not only the group’s metaphysical approach, but also their belief in the role of art in the struggle between good and evil. Characteristic of the group’s style was the use of intense colours and simplified forms, as demonstrated by August Macke. As Kandinsky noted, the group experimented with different ways of expressing ‘inner’ states.

Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, is an artistic movement that developed in American painting in the 1940s, through inspiration from modern European painting. This trend is considered the first purely American artistic phenomenon of global significance, which placed New York at the centre of art. The term ‘Abstract Expressionism’ was first used in 1946 by the critic Robert Coates in the pages of The New Yorker magazine.

Before the Second World War, American painting did not exist as a coherent trend. Only the arrival in America in the early years of the war of painters, sculptors, poets and musicians who had left Europe to escape the German occupation set the tone for American art.

Representatives of the trend.

Abstract Expressionism was represented by such famous artists as Max Ernst, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and André Masson.

In technical terms, Abstract Expressionism derived its roots from Surrealism, focusing on the spontaneous, automatic or even subconscious creative act. A characteristic technique was to drip paint onto a canvas spread out on the floor (as Jackson Pollock did), inspired by the work of the German Surrealist, Max Ernst. This movement combined the deep emotionality and desire to express the emotions of the German Expressionists with the anti figurativeness of the European abstract school, with currents such as Cubism, Futurism and Bauhaus. It was seen as part of a rebellious, anarchist, even nihilistic current.

New York School – trends.

• action painting

This was so-called gestural painting. The main qualities were randomness, spontaneity. The most important thing was the creative act itself. The technique appealed to the artist’s subconscious impulsive action, which the trend’s creators postulated as the only authentic way of creating art.

The main representatives of action-art were:

-Jackson Pollock

–Willem de Kooning

• color field painting 

Flat surface painting, also known as colour field painting, emphasises the use of colour as the main element. The artist focuses on conveying emotion through colour stretched over a large area of the canvas, while maintaining strict control over the creative process.

Colour field painting was represented by, among others: Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler,Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman

Despite the varied nature within the movement, its representatives showed similarities. There was a noticeable predilection for large canvases, a focus on flatness and a holistic approach that treated all parts of the canvas equally, without clearly distinguishing central sections at the expense of edges.

As the first independent artistic trend in the United States, Abstract Expressionism introduced the energy and creative power of post-World War II America to the world. In addition, it drew attention to the need for, and ability to develop aesthetically, independently of European standards. Its international recognition came in the 1950s; its European variant is informel, a term introduced by Michel Tapié in 1952.

Expressionism in architecture.

A direction in architecture that grew out of Art Nouveau and Modernism, it originated in Germany and was active in Europe between 1923 and 1935. It was also reflected in the United States, where it is often referred to as art déco.

Expressionist architecture was characterised by a strong emphasis on vertical or horizontal direction and the creation of dynamic forms to give the impression of speed, soaring, modernity. The plastic forms were inspired by nature and Gothic elements.

Expressionism in architecture developed mainly in Germany, but was also important in the Netherlands and Central European countries. The Expressionist group was the circle Die Gläserne Kette (German for ‘The Glass Chain’), founded in 1919 by members of a council of artists gathered around Bruno Taut. The ideas of the Expressionists were utopian and anarchist, linked to a belief in the causal power of glass house architecture and revolution. The main architectural motif was to be the crown of the city – a kind of grand cultural centre. Cities were to replace the forms of settlements and their inhabitants were to be closely connected to nature.

Expressionism in architecture made its debut mainly in the so-called streamlined style, also referred to as the dynamic style, in the 1920s. This trend referred to the modern shapes of cars, planes and especially transatlantic liners. Expressionist buildings were characterised by modernist elements such as glazing, repeated or identical floors, and the functionality of façade elements. At the same time, they expressed strong Art Nouveau influences through the fluidity of the construction, the disjointedness of the buildings giving an expressive character, as well as the soaring structure and sometimes nature-inspired ornamentation. While acknowledging the need for functional design, the creators of Expressionist architecture sought to give buildings form from an understanding of their programme and typology, and to give them movement and fluidity.

Expressionism in film.

Expressionism appeared in German cinema in 1913 with the film The Student from Prague, directed by Stellan Rye. The screenplay for this film drew on romantic fantasy and told the story of a young student who sold his reflection in a mirror. This trend had its full impact after the end of the First World War, when Robert Wiene made the film ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ in 1919. Thanks to its extraordinary visual setting, this film became a unique work, with artificial sets created by three Expressionist painters, Walter Reimann, Hermann Warm and Walter Röhrig. The scenery consists of painted planes that consciously deform reality, full of curves and refractions of perspective. The whole is complemented by the contrast of black and white.

In keeping with their literary inspirations, Expressionist directors often turned to uncanny stories with irrational or criminal plots, always spiced with elements of mystery and dark atmosphere. The filmmakers perfectly exploited the potential of the screen, treating it like a painter’s canvas to be consciously filled in. Their trademark became their ability to compose frames. Expressionists paid little attention to editing, which sometimes made films appear static due to the simple change of shots. A characteristic element of expressionism was the shadows cast by objects and people. Max Reinhardt and his theatrical concepts played an important role in the aesthetics of Expressionist film. The Austrian director, who worked on German stages, was one of the main reformers of 20th century European theatre. He introduced innovative staging projects, such as the innovative use of lighting or groups of extras as living scenery, especially in productions presented in large spaces such as the circus. Reinhardt’s clear influence can be seen in the work of Fritz Lang.

Summary

To summarise the article, the 19th and 20th centuries saw a breakthrough in Eurocentric art history, when artists began to search for individual means of expression, defying the rigid rules of academism. The revolutionary result of this search was Impressionism, which opened the way for other innovative artistic experiments. Impressionism was born in France, moving away from traditional subjects and painting techniques and focusing on the moment, mood and light, reflecting changes in the perception and representation of reality.

Expressionism, although often confused with Impressionism, signified a radically different attitude – it focused on expressing the artist’s inner emotions and experiences, often through distorted forms and intense colours. Major Expressionist groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter developed in Germany and influenced later trends in modern art, including Abstract Expressionism in the United States.

Both movements, although different, had a huge influence on the development of modern painting, expressing the spirit of their times – Impressionism, through its subtle grasp of reality, and Expressionism, through its emotional and often turbulent depiction of the human experience.

At Station of Art Gallery, we have works to delight fans of Expressionism. In the work of the artist Franciszek Ledóchowski we can find many formal and technical as well as ideological references to this trend.

Source: Wikipedia.org