Expressionism

9 Key excerpts on "Expressionism"

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  Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism

  • Paul Poplawski(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. 1908. Trans. Michael Bullock. London: Routledge, 1953. Expressionism, German Literary The term Expressionism has been used in various ways, in a technical sense of the German romantic tradition confronting European modernist trends, or in a his- torical sense of communities of artists. It does not form a movement, since the ex- pressionists lacked a common goal, being separate from each other both geographi- cally and over time, from Berlin to Vienna, and from 1910 to the 1930s. The only means of unity were provided by the pub- lications Die Aktion (1911-1932), edited by Hans Pfempfert, and Der Sturm (1911- 1932), edited by Herwarth Walden until 1919 (he also organized the Sturm- Galerie, Sturm-Verlag, Sturmbuhne, and Sturmschulen). As a consequence of its diffuse history, literary Expressionism also lacks central defining traits. One of its most important tendencies, though, is its confrontation of opposing romantic and naturalist, subjective and objective, realist 100 Expressionism, German Literary and idealist perspectives, as polarities which are irreconcilable, yet whose ten- sion generates an intense creative vitality. Expressionism emerged from the nineteenth century tradition of romantic, sentimental nature poetry. Georg Heym and Georg Trakl, and even Kurt Schwit- ters, first wrote poetry in this style, ex- pressing their subjective feelings in relation to love and nature. Yet this style had become inadequate after the rapid in- dustrialization and urbanization since Germany's unification in 1871. Writers were attracted to the dynamism of the city, yet had become alienated from nature, and from their own subjectivity which had be- come reified and fragmented. The driving force behind much of expressionist poetry is the attempt to regain an organic expe- rience of a dislocated reality.

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  Paul Tillich's Philosophy of Art

  • Michael Palmer(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  For the preoccupation with protest and drama, with the drive towards self-expression unimpeded by conventions, not only frustrated the Expressionists' own attempts at stylistic classification —which largely accounts for the comparatively short lifespan of the Secessions and the wholesale defections to other groups—but also, and much more significantly, fostered the cult of the strong artistic personal-ity, of the artist concerned primarily with the transmission of his own personal experiences and according to his own individual dictates. And this in turn provides us with an alternative interpretation of the expres-sionist method: namely, that the relegation of the subject-matter by compositional or figurative distortion was required, not because this style is thereby expressive of that whidi transcends the subject-matter as its ultimate reference, but because in this way no meaning other than that intended by the artist and perceived by the spectator could be • 5 Der Blaue Reiter (München: R. Piper, 1912; Dokumentarische Neuausgabe von Klaus Lankheit, 1965) p. 31. Many of the movement's early proclama-tions are included in Kasimir Edschmid's Frühe Manifeste; Epochen des Expressionismus (Hamburg: C. Wegner, 1957). M Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsy-chologie (München: R. Piper, 1907) pp. 1—33. 4» 30 Expressionism and the Category of Expressiveness attributed to the canvas. Put differently, the hallmark of expressionistic art is its anti-naturalistic subjectivism: the attempt by the painter to express the world of his inner experience and the freshness of his sensations in their simplest form. And, as Sdimidt-Rottluff remarked, there is nothing essentially new in this.

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  The Twentieth Century 1890-1945

  • Raymond Furness(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, with which this book opened, ironically described the confusion of different artistic styles which characterised the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. The naturalist-impressionist tendency, which concentrated upon surface realities, or social and political problems, and the aesthetic or neo-romantic attitude, which was one of flight from the world towards the creation of artificial paradises, both failed to satisfy on a profound level. The former tendency remained too close to the surface of things, and, in its emphasis on social amelioration, was felt to be stultifying and drab; the latter tendency, in its emphasis on the rarefied and the refined, became ultra-precious, decadent and jejune. The naturalist’s description of social conditions gave way to the expression of a subjective vision regardless of mimesis, and the concern for human life, for man crushed by pitiless machinery and ruthless cities, became far more intense than mere social reporting; likewise the emphasis upon inner vision, and on the fertile powers of the imagination, would far exceed the symbolist cult of the soul. More vital emotions, more dynamic powers of description were extolled, as was an intense subjectivity which had no reluctance in destroying the conventional picture of reality in order that the expression be more powerful. And if distortion and aggressive expression of emotion were found in earlier works of art, then these were extolled as being forerunners of the new outlook, which was given the name ‘Expressionism’.

  The term, derived from painting, has never been used with precision. Associated with intensity of expression is the tendency to dissolve conventional form, to abstract both colours and metaphors and use various anti-naturalist devices, and hence the word ‘expressionist’ was also used to describe modernist techniques in general; not unlike imagism, the word was used to denote an anti-mimetic employment of autotelic metaphors. The movement towards modern techniques, such as simultaneity, collage-effects and startling, even absurd, imagery, may have little to do with fervour and passion, but the word ‘expressionist’ has had to describe both phenomena. In Germany particularly the sense of revolt implied in the new movement was associated with a vitalism which often found political manifestations on both the Left and the Right; the word ‘expressionist’ came to be applied to a desire to alter radically the meaning of art, man, and society: a spiritual regeneration was frequently adumbrated. It is no wonder that the word has been increasingly modified, qualified and rejected because of its lack of precision: to group such writers as Jakob van Hoddis (1887-1942), Franz Werfel (1890-1945), Georg Kaiser (1878-1945), and Hanns Johst (b. 1890) under this blanket term is hardly satisfactory, and when the names Carl Sternheim, Frank Wedekind and even Alfred Mombert are claimed as being ‘expressionist’, then the critic is inclined to make objections to its use.

  A further problem concerns the applicability of the term ‘expressionist’ to writers not necessarily German, that is, the desirability of using the word to describe authors such as Strindberg, Dostoevski, Whitman and others who expressed with passionate intensity extreme subjective states. Playwrights such as Sorge (1892—1916) and Hasenclever (1890—1940) learned much from Strindberg’s ‘Stationendramen’, with their pseudo-religious portrayal of purification and resurrection. Zola’s letter of 14 December 1889 to Strindberg, lamenting the schematic nature of his characters, is an interesting reaction to Strindberg’s rejection of naturalism and his development towards what could be called more expressionist themes, of which To Damascus is the finest example. Both the dramatic technique used by Strindberg (the characters as emanations of one soul) and the ultimate message (the need for self-transcendence) will later dominate the German stage: Strindberg is of great importance to any study concerning the roots of those anti-naturalistic tendencies which appeared at the turn of the century. The predilection for extreme psychic states, ecstatic or desperate, came to be identified with these tendencies and also termed expressionistic; here Dostoevski is of importance. The naturalists had admired him for his portrayal of poverty and social outcasts (particularly in Crime and Punishment),

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  Modernisms

  A Literary Guide, Second Edition

  • Peter Nicholls(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  . . are soul states and the violent emo-tions welling up from the innermost recesses of the subconscious’. 16 There are several reasons for the Expressionists’ preoccupation with violent emotion, first among which was their generally shared view of modernity as a condition of servitude from which humanity must break free. In contrast to the Futurists, these writers and artists were obsessed with the infernal nature of the city, with its subordination of the individual to the mechanistic environments of tenement and fac-tory. In Hermann Bahr’s words, Expressionism was a product of ‘the strenuous battle between the soul and the machine for the possession of man’. 17 Subjective emotion seemed to suffer a constant repres-sion, and in its boldness and grandiosity Expressionist art sought to direct that emotion as a transformative energy against social constraints. In practice, Expressionism veered between an often deca-dent preoccupation with types of spiritual ‘sickness’ and an attempt to harness liberated emotion to this project of social renewal; human-ity might thus be regenerated, bourgeois individualism might yield to an active sense of spiritual community, and the dawn of the ‘New Man’ may be in sight. These large-scale objectives led on the aesthetic front to a funda-mental opposition of Expressionism to earlier forms of Naturalism and Impressionism. For these writers and artists, Impressionism sim-ply reflected humanity’s servitude, projecting the passive image of ‘man lowered to the position of a gramophone record of the outer world’, as Hermann Bahr put it in one of the most famous mani-festos of the new movement.

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  Traditions in World Cinema

  • Steven Jay Schneider, Linda Badley, R Barton Palmer, Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, Steven Jay Schneider(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  As a result, expressionist art in practically every way seemed to suggest a protest against the norm: the extremes of language in the plays and 15 manifestos, the alienating and menacing cityscapes of the graphic art, the grotesque and caricatured figures of paintings, the sinister shadows and unbal-anced images of the films, and the recurring themes of madness, duplicity and alienation. For these reasons, Richard Murphy suggests that we read expres-sionist art primarily as a kind of aesthetic ‘oppositional strategy’, one that aimed ‘to defamiliarise vision and to unlock conventionalised constructions’. 2 That defamiliarisation proceeded by a number of techniques drawn from the different expressionist-influenced arts, all converging in the creation of what Murphy terms ‘a variety of oppositional discourses’ that strike at ‘the very structure of the representational system’. 3 Thus, in a concerted effort to show how, as R. S. Furness offers, ‘an essential, inner reality may be made more accessible by deliberate distortion and unreality ’, 4 the emerging expressionist cinema drew on methods found in the theatre, painting and graphic arts, such as stylised sets, exaggerated acting, distortions of space, heavy use of shadows, irregular compositions that emphasise oblique lines, as well as specifically filmic techniques like low-key lighting, dutch angles and composition in depth, to create a vision that pointedly challenges the authority of classical representa-tion. Those techniques served to trouble the audience’s customary perceptions and prodded them to recognise how much their sense of the world was care-fully constructed by various cultural conventions. One more specific effect would become especially symptomatic of a German expressionist cinema, as we shall see.

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  Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918

  • Matthew Jefferies(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  One newspaper wrote: ‘Disgusting! What an unbridled imagination, devoid of all mental hygiene, is here laid bare; what sordid delight in the abysmally ugly.’ 41 In the theatre, the German Expressionists were influenced not only by Strindberg, Wedekind and the music dramas of Kokoschka and Kandinsky, but by the director Max Reinhardt’s new production ideas at the Deutsches Theater. Thus noise, spectacle, movement and physical gesture all became key features of Expressionist theatre. Expressionism, NATIONALISM AND WAR 243 The Italian Futurist Marinetti inspired August Stramm (1874–1915) to develop a condensed and economic form of poetic language – staccato sentences of just one or two words – that is sometimes referred to as the ‘Telegram Style’ and which also became a defining characteristic of Expressionist drama. 42 In this way the ‘single emo-tional word replaces the involved conceptual sentence as the basic unit of Expressionist language’, 43 although long monologues can also be found in the works of playwrights like Stramm, Reinhard Sorge (1892–1916), and Georg Kaiser (1878–1945), whose Von morgens bis mitternachts (‘From Morning to Midnight’, 1912) is still performed today. These dramatists also explored the expressive pos-sibilities of punctuation – especially the exclamation mark! – and the full-throated scream. The latter even gave its name to a sub-category of Expressionist theatre, the Schreidrama . Apart from linguistic innovation, other features of early Expressionist plays included an episodic structure, powerful imagery, and a preoccupation with ‘types’ rather than carefully drawn charac-ters. Where Naturalism had focused on the assemblage of external detail to capture a particular milieu and to build character, Expressionist theatre featured archetypes and caricatures: old man, young woman, the peasant, the clown, the prostitute and so on. As Walter Sokel has noted: ‘Expressionist drama is theme-centered rather than plot- or conflict-centered.

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  Adorno's Poetics of Form

  • Josh Robinson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  In contrast to Kraus, the expressionists strived to jump over their own shadows. They uncompromisingly asserted the primacy of expression. Their intention was to use words purely as expressive values such as relations of color or tone in painting and music. Language’s resistance to the expressionist idea was so tenacious that it was hardly ever realized at all except by the Dadaists. (NzL 434/NtL 2: 98)

  Literary Expressionism constitutes in Adorno’s eyes an attempt, to put it in the terms of Dialectic of Enlightenment , to privilege the image character of language at the expense of its sign character. That such an attempt can for Adorno only end in failure is clear from the account of the split of language into these two characters as a result of the division of intellectual labor into science and poetry (DA 34/DE 13). To attempt simply to reverse or to ignore this split would be to act as if this division of labor had not taken place. In the light of the predominance of sign over image within what Adorno terms the scientific conception of language, the resistance encountered by the expressionist attempt to reject precisely this aspect of language is hardly surprising. In his essay on Bloch’s Spuren , Adorno suggests a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between expression and conceptuality, arguing that the expressionist scream is simply drowned out by the fact that ‘the universal concept, which washes away the trace and is hardly able to suspend it within itself, must for the sake of its own intention nonetheless speak as if the trace were present within it’ (NzL 247/NtL 1: 213).

  Adorno insists in his discussion of Kraus in ‘Presuppositions’ that everything linguistic bears the trace of the conceptual, ‘even in its most extreme reduction to expressive value’ (NzL 434–35/NtL 2: 98). Literary Expressionism was in his view condemned to obsolescence by its failure to acknowledge that the conceptual element of language cannot simply be shrugged off, that emancipation from conceptuality can only exist as a moment, a tendency, a struggle. Artworks recognize in the concept something hostile to art, but success in this struggle would be impossible for a literary artwork, since it would require the elimination of conceptuality from language, and thus the end of language. ‘Even the stuttered sound, insofar as it is word and not sound, retains its conceptual range, and the context of linguistic structures, through which alone they arrange themselves into an artistic whole, can hardly dispense with the conceptual element’ (NzL 435/NtL 2: 99). Here both expression and form are presented as being hostile to conceptuality: expression because it cannot escape conceptual mediation, form because the concept, as the ‘unity of tokens of that which it subsumes’ (NzL 435/NtL 2: 99), retains its connection to that aspect of the empirical world which is foreign to the law of form and cannot be incorporated into the work. What Adorno sees as the failure of Expressionism is perhaps best illustrated by his comments on Borchardt’s opposition to it, in which he notes that the expressionists never resolved the contradiction posed by the production of works, despite their attempt to follow expression’s hostility to its mediation through form and ‘suspend the concept of the thoroughly constructed work’ (NzL 552/NtL 2: 207).

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  Form in the Menschheitsdämmerung

  A Study of Prosodic Elements and Style in German Expressionist Poetry

  • Robert P. Newton(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In practice these questions of fact often become hopelessly confused with theory, admonition and subjective feeling. It is of utmost importance to recognize that one can, among Expressionist authors, adduce opinions pro and con on all of these issues. This means that the 'Expressionist spirit' is not inherently formless, but that form in all senses is problematic in its thinking. However, the cliché of Expressionism, as it soon took shape and currently is still often repeated, tends to mean by 'form' the literary form (and with great frequency in the case of poetry simply verse form) and to opine that, in this respect, Expressionism is indeed formless or represents a dissolution of conventional forms. This is a considerable simplification. a) Form in Expressionist Criticism The problem posed for the human subject in the demarcation of itself and its object was the first of the 'form' problems men-tioned, certainly a major issue in the study of Expressionism as a phase in the history of thought and sensibility. Concerned ae we are with verse form and structure, we shall not further deal with it directly. On the other hand the corollary argument about the status of form in literary art, whether or not it is essential to the latter's nature, is directly apropos. This is basically the traditional anta-gonism between Ausdruckskunst and Formkunst being voiced anew. Those who discredit the necessity of form, the loudest voices of the times, conceive of form as some pure or absolute external pattern imposed and manipulated by the artist for its own sake. We may cite Arno Schirokauer in his Expressionismus der Lyrik: Das Wesentliche mußte hinter den Formen sein, sie. .. waren nur Schleier und Schein. 13 18 Arno Schirokauer, Expressionismus der Lyrik (1924), in Germanistische Studien, ed. Fritz Strich (Hamburg, 1957), p. 22.

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  The Political Art of Bob Dylan

  • David Boucher, Gary Browning(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  How can the alienated masses reawaken to a truly revolutionary art? Nevertheless, we do not have to share his pessimism, and it is possible to apply his aesthetic theory to grasp the essence of Dylan’s unique, if short-lived, achievement. It is no exaggeration to say that Dylan’s songs of this period constitute a clear break with existing forms of song, using modernist poetic techniques and an ethical content which bears close similarities to that of German Expressionism. Expressionism sought the most direct expression of intense human feelings through the use of condensed and intense imagery, delivered in order to shock the recipient into a strong emotional reaction. Syntactical compression, symbolic picture-sequences and a fervent declamatory tone were key features (Kellner 1983: 4). Expressionists sub- scribed to a clear social ethic which involved an intense commitment to individual freedom, the love of others (nicht ich, sondern du) and the brotherhood of all humanity (Bethell 1959: 361 in Long 1993: part two). Their journals strove for a new ethics of humanity, rejecting not only art for art’s sake but also politics for politics’ sake, redefining true poli- 84 Lawrence Wilde tics and true art as aspects of the philosophical ideal of ‘the ethical’ (Wright 1983: 83). Although its rebelliousness was clear for all to see, the specific forms of the ‘new man’ and the new society remained unclear, but it was also resolutely opposed to the prevailing conser- vatism, particularly to the strong authoritarianism and militarism dis- played in Wilhelmite Germany. These central features of Expressionism are all salient in Dylan’s work of this period, and there are more spe- cific similarities in the content of the images. In Expressionist imagery these conservative forces were often related to torpor, decay or death.

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