EXPRESSIONISM

Expressionism marked a new interest at the turn of the 20th century in the ideals of Romanticism. The first artists to explore the distortion of reality to express inner feelings and ideas were the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944), the Austrian Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), and the German Paula Mondersohn-Becker who died when she was only 31. But it was Klimt’s protegé, Egon Schiele (1890-1918), and his rival, Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), who fully developed the first wave of Expressionism, with portraits charged with sexual and psychological tension, represented in their drawings by powerful, angular lines and jarring touches of colour. They were followed in Germany in 1905 by Die Brücke, a group led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), and in 1911 by another group, Der Blaue Reiter, which included Franz Marc (1880-1916) and the Russian Wasilly Kandinsky (1866-1944).