User:DionysosProteus/Sandbox21
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Expressionism was a international modernist avant-garde movement in the arts that originated in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.[1] As promoted by its many manifestoes, reviews, and books, Expressionism was one of the most self-conscious movements in the history of the arts.[2] The term covers diverse groupings of artists, writers, film-makers, and others and it includes work made in a broad range of art forms, from painting and sculpture, literature and poetry, to theatre, dance, cinema, architecture, and music.[3] No group of painters explicitly called itself "Expressionist" and some writers resisted the term, though it was adopted by artists and writers working in other media, from theatre, film, poetry, etc... get the citations for which exactly.[4] It has been applied retrospectively to significant precursors from the 19th century, such as the plays of Georg Büchner, August Strindberg, and Frank Wedekind and the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch.[5] The movement is best known for its cinematic masterpieces, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924), and Metropolis (1927).[6]
- Sandbox for Expressionism
Expressionism sprang from intense feelings of dissatisfaction with German society among the younger generation and it proclaimed itself to be a "new art" that would inaugurate a "new life".[7] Thanks to its rapid development in the last decades of the 19th century, Germany became an industrial-economic world power.[8] Expressionism responded to the increasing alienation and mechanisation of life that this capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation brought.[9] Unlike the Symbolists' retreat from this new world, Expressionism confronted its realities with a critical attitude.[10] It was hostile towards the instrumental rationality of science, industrial and technical modernisation, and positivist thought and it rejected 'scientific' approaches to art (such as Naturalism and Pointillism).[11] Instead, it championed subjective expression, individual vision, and rebellion against the values and institutions of bourgeois society and its culture.[12] It often used distortion, the grotesque, and primitivist features to express the experience of modernity.[13] Its "famous cries and shrieks", Douglas Kellner argues, "represent the cries of the individual subject facing repression and threats to its autonomy, inner life, and values."[14]
Expressionism reacted against Realism and Naturalism in the arts.[15] Rather than attempting an objective representation of the surface appearance of external reality, it offered a subjective expression of feeling and imagination and a vision of the world distorted by intense moods, ideas, and emotions.[16] Expressionist writing presents a monodramatic view of the world as seen through the eyes of one character, who is often an alter ego for the author.[17] Expressionism often sought to replicate the formal, associative logic of dreams and depicted puppet-like characters in autonomised, trance-like states who are subject to hostile forces beyond their comprehension or control.[18] Its recurrent themes concerned the erruption of violent, irrational, and chaotic forces from beneath the rigid, reified surface of modern society, the transgression of taboos (especially sexual taboos), and class and inter-generational conflict (particularly with an authoritarian father figure).[19] The image of a recalcitrant or hostile machine (embodied in an automaton, robot, cyborg, or golem figure) expressed its suspicion and fear of technology.[20] The devastations of imperialist warfare reinforced and extended the early Expressionist visions—the something metropolis foreshadowed the battlefields of the First World War and its mechanised slaughter appeared to be a horrifying extension of capitalist production—and prompted a greater degree of social commitment in the movement.[21]
Beginning in the first decade of the 20th century, Expressionism established itself as a major movement during the early Weimar Republic and was still a significant force in the cinema in the later 1920s.[22] After the war, it developed both a utopian activist strand with a more optimistic, humanitarian rhetoric and another, more sober and sceptical strand, which was developed by writers and artists who had experienced the front.[23] When its optimistic, fraternal sentiments were seen to have failed to cope with the rise of the Right, German artistic culture experienced a "sobering up" and moved towards a greater realism.[24] This became known as the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Sobriety" or "New Objectivity") movement in Germany in the 1920s, which explicitly opposed itself to Expressionism.[25]