“Expressionism”  is an art movement which originated in Germany the early 20th century. It’s an art style  meant to communicate emotions throught shape, line, tone and color. With an ultimate aim to communicate intense emotions, shapes are distorted with features exaggerated to created maximum emotional impact.

Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream is a favorite example.

Famous expressionists include Edvard Munch, August Macke, Emil Nolde
,  Max Pechstein, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger; preceeded by inflence of  Cézanne
, Gauguin, Van Gogh.

Czech art historian Antonín Matějček in 1910, defined Expressionism as as the opposite ofimpressionism: “An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself… (but rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures… Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence [...and] are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols.”

This basically means that Expressionists impose their emotions and feelings with the aim of arousing such response from the viewer. Their depiction of reality is subjective. This spontaneous self – expression transcends though time since, and is evident in the art of modern artists and art movements.

Early Expressionists portraits are not regarded as representations of likeness, but rather a revelation of the phyche and soul of the subject. While Oska Kokoschka’s portraits represents spontaniety in emotion, Egon Schiele’s seems more staged and exaggerated.