EXPRESSIONISM AND FAUVISM BOOK

All art may be described as the expression, in a formal medium, of sensations, observations, and visualized thoughts - the more or less extreme compression of experience into the subjective mode.

Hence if a style is to be entitled "Expressionism," it needs special standards by which it may be distinguished from other accepted forms of artistic expression, and it must be defined.

The style or concept of "Expressionism" was confronted by an established approach to human reality that was largely a survival of the artistic thinking of the nineteenth century and the "art nouveau" that grew out of it. Its development produced controversial attempts to define the boundaries of the new movement. As the phenomenon "Expressionism" recedes into the past, it becomes possible to clarify its specific characteristics, although it remains as hard as ever to fix its boundaries or to confine oneself to a description of "classical Expressionism."

An understanding of what essentially constitutes Expressionism perhaps can be facilitated by considering it as a "manner" rather than a "style." Its underlying characteristic (and this includes literary and musical Expressionism) consists of an over-intensification of experience, a rejection of the classical canon, a distortion and exaggeration bordering on the hysterical, a shattering of traditional forms and the reordering of the fragments to make vehicles for changed thinking and sensation, and a new, more critical and emphatic approach to the world. In its origins, admittedly, it must be regarded as an intellectual compulsion to break with tradition. If we are to call any particular, well-marked form of life and thought a "style," then its reflection in art as such must be recognizable. In the present case a particular form of artistic expression was adopted as a goal; its motivation as well as its practical and theoretical foundations were consciously recognized, and this led to the development of a style that became independent of the mere fact of expression.

This was "Expressionism," but the exact delimitation of the concept still remained unfixed.

Even before the term had been coined the roots of its unrestricted possibilities may be discerned, for instance, in the work of the great trio Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Munch- a matter to which we shall return later.

In the course of the development of Expressionism, from the turn of the century up to the various forms in which it was carried on - whether diluted or with a shift of emphasis, or with changed significance as after the First World War - contemporaries produced a wide variety of impressions and definitions of it.