Fauvism and Expressionism (jan 1, 1900 – jan 1, 1935)

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Fauvism is the style of "les Fauves" (French for "the wild beasts"), a group of early 20th-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. Fauve artists used pure, brilliant colour aggressively applied straight from the paint tubes to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas. While Fauvism as a style began around 1904 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1905–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were André Derain and Henri Matisse.

Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality. Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.
The roots of the German Expressionist school lay in the works of Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom in the period 1885–1900 evolved a highly personal painting style. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity. They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.
The second and principal wave of Expressionism began about 1905, when a group of German artists led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner formed a loose association called Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). The group included Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. These painters were in revolt against what they saw as the superficial naturalism of academic Impressionism. They wanted to reinfuse German art with a spiritual vigour they felt it lacked, and they sought to do this through an elemental, highly personal and spontaneous expression. Die Brücke’s original members were soon joined by the Germans Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Müller.
The German Expressionists soon developed a style notable for its harshness, boldness, and visual intensity. They used jagged, distorted lines; rough, rapid brushwork; and jarring colours to depict urban street scenes and other contemporary subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their instability and their emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety, disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response to the ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they discerned in modern life.

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