Collection: Expressionism & Fauvism

Expressionism and Fauvism share a generation, the years between 1905 and the First World War, and a single working principle: that colour, line, and the painted surface should carry feeling directly rather than describe the visible world. The two movements developed in parallel, the Fauves in Paris, the German Expressionists in Dresden and Munich, and they read each other through exhibitions, journals, and rapidly circulating reproductions.

Fauvism took its name from a critic's reference to wild beasts at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. Henri Matisse led the group, pushing colour off its descriptive duties and treating it as autonomous structural matter. The movement was short, effectively dispersed by 1908, but it set the conditions for everything that followed in modern French painting.

German Expressionism worked the same impulse with greater anguish. Die Brücke, founded in Dresden in 1905, brought woodcut, sharp colour, and figural distortion to bear on a Wilhelmine society its members rejected. Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, formed around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, gave the impulse a more theoretical, almost mystical edge, with Kandinsky's writings on colour and form leading him to the first canvases of pure abstraction. Paul Klee moved through the same circles before developing his distinct graphic universe.

Vienna produced its own intense variant, where Egon Schiele turned line into raw psychological transcription. Postwar Germany extended the impulse into Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity that lent the same expressive distortion to satirical and political ends.

The prints here include woodcuts, lithographs, and posters from across these branches. The collection sits between the gallery's Post-Impressionism holdings, the immediate forebear, and the Cubism & Abstract Art selection, where the same generation took non-representational form in a different direction.