Collection: Expressionism & Fauvism

Expressionism and Fauvism are two parallel modernist movements that emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century. Both treated colour, line, and the painted surface as carriers of subjective emotion rather than as descriptions of the visible world, and both broke from the academic and Impressionist traditions that had dominated European painting in the nineteenth century.

Fauvism took its name from a critic's reference to wild beasts at the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne, where Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck exhibited canvases of unmixed colour applied at deliberate disregard of descriptive accuracy. The movement was short, effectively dispersed by 1908, but Matisse continued to develop the colour programme through to his late paper cut compositions.

German Expressionism developed in two principal groups. Die Brücke, The Bridge, was founded in Dresden in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, with Emil Nolde joining shortly afterward. The group revived the German woodcut tradition and applied sharp colour and figural distortion to Wilhelmine society. Der Blaue Reiter, The Blue Rider, formed in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and included Paul Klee. The almanac the group published in May 1912 became the movement's theoretical centre.

Vienna produced its own intense variant in the work of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Käthe Kollwitz developed a parallel Expressionist tradition in printmaking. Postwar Germany extended the impulse into Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity that lent Expressionist distortion to satirical and political subjects in the 1920s. The principal sub-movements include Fauvism, Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, New Objectivity, and Neo-Expressionism.