Expressionism established itself as one of the founding movements of modern art, emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century as a reaction against Naturalism and Impressionism, with the ambition of conveying inner states rather than faithfully representing the visible world.
Appearing through groups such as Die Brücke in Dresden and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, it developed a pictorial language based on the expressive distortion of forms, chromatic intensity, and a radical subjectivity inherited from Van Gogh, Munch, and Ensor, whose works had paved the way for a painting rooted in raw emotion.
Kirchner, Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Egon Schiele illustrate the diversity of approaches within a movement united by a shared conviction: that color, line, and material should serve as vehicles for anxiety, vitality, and existential intensity rather than instruments for describing reality.
Far from being confined to the German art scene, Expressionism had a lasting impact on international artistic creation, from Chaïm Soutine in France to the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s, the Neue Wilde movement of the 1980s, and numerous contemporary figurative painters who continue to claim this legacy.
On Artsper, this selection brings together works that extend this Expressionist tradition through chromatic intensity, freedom of gesture, and the exploration of the most intimate dimensions of human experience.
