Describe some of the stylistic conventions associated with the expressionist art movement. Post some additional examples of Expressionist Art:
Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist wants to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions that objects or events cause within a person.
The artist does this through distortion, exaggeration, and fantasy and through the vivid, or dynamic application of elements.
Expressionism can be seen in Germanic and Nordic art particularly in times of change or spiritual crisis, as it is a way for artists to show their emotions or thoughts to the world around them.
Some examples of expressionist art include:
“This bent and sightless man holds close to him a large, round guitar. Its brown body represents the painting’s only shift in color. Both physically and symbolically, the instrument fills the space around the solitary figure, who seems oblivious to his blindness and poverty as he plays. At the time the painting was made, literature of the Symbolist movement included blind characters who possessed powers of inner vision. The thin, skeleton-like figure of the blind musician also has roots in art from Picasso’s native country, Spain. The old man’s elongated limbs and cramped, angular posture recall the figures of the great 16th-century artist El Greco.” – https://www.pablopicasso.org/old-guitarist.jsp
“Death and Fire suggests that abstraction and representation have been mutually accommodating, or otherwise complementary means of expression, since time immemorial.
Knowing that the end was near, Klee painted his own grimacing death mask without compassion. A silhouette moves forward from the background on the right, and in the foreground, dominating the work, a death’s head on top of a skeleton comes out of the earth, brandishing a golden ring with which it tries to catch the attention of the silhouette, which is going to go across the fire of life. But this is merely an interpretation; whereas the shock of the image hits one immediately. Using well-tried plastic means, Klee managed to transpose the ultimate human challenge into artistic form. Death’s face recalls the tormented features of a pastel self-portrait of the same year subtitled Hold Fasti.” – https://www.paulklee.net/death-and-fire.jsp