Expressionist painters wrestled with the psychology of nature itself.
If you think of Expressionism in art, you perhaps think of the tortured, twisted figures in portraits by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele or of the frenzied Berlin street scenes painted by Ludwig Kirchner. Expressionism exposed, in very physical terms, the trauma of being vulnerably human in the troubled years preceding and following World War I.
The Expressionist impulse in painting is found not only in the human figure or in depictions of the modern urban environment but in representations of the natural landscape, too.
Expressionism
Like many terms in art, "Expressionism" has had different meanings to different artists over the years. In simple terms, an Expressionist painting does not merely picture a scene or provide an attractive arrangement of colors and shapes; it sets out to express a human feeling--usually a very strong emotion.
As a term, it can be contrasted with Impressionism, which sought accurately and objectively to reproduce effects of color and light in nature, although Impressionist pictures can, of course, provoke feeling in the viewer.
The Expressionist Movement
Of course, many painters from the earliest days of art have had the aim of expressing powerful and profound feelings. In art history, Expressionism generally refers to the groupings of artists, mainly based in Germany and Austria in the early 20th century, who wrestled with the profound psychological stress and upheaval of modern life and those artists who immediately influenced them.
It is no coincidence, of course, that Austria was the home of Sigmund Freud in these years and the birthplace of a new and often dark way of looking at human psychology.
The Expressionist Landscape
One painter who used landscape, rather than just human figures, to express powerful feelings is Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh died in 1890, before the Expressionist movement was truly under way, but the reeling, turbulent field of corn under the looming dark sky in his last painting, "Cornfield with Crows," is quite expressive.
A more immediate influence on the Expressionists was the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, whose "The Scream" must be one of the most famous images in the world.
"The Scream"
In Munch's familiar painting "The Scream," a distorted and distressed figure in the foreground covers his ears and opens his mouth and eyes wider than you might think possible. Two other figures walk casually in the background. Beyond are water, two tiny boats in silhouette and, hanging over the picture, a sky streaked with savage tones of red.
The casual viewer might assume that the main figure is screaming. His mouth, after all, is gaping. Closer inspection suggests this is not the case: He is reacting, in terror, to something he hears. Munch's own comments on the painting confirm this. The inspiration came from an occasion when he was walking by a fjord, anxious and exhausted, and suddenly, "I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass through nature." The water and especially the sky are part of the scream itself.
Nature and Psychology
This gives the key to understanding how later Expressionists could infuse nature with psychological significance. The methods, simply, are color and distortion. Karl Schmidt-Rotluff used a dramatic red palette even when painting apparently innocent subjects such as "Corner of a Park;" the sky seems almost to bleed. In "Red Tower in a Park," the tower and surrounding trees seem to bend and twist before the viewer's eyes. No tranquility is in these landscapes.
Kirchner's "Winter Landscape by Moonlight"--another blood-red sky--shows mountain peaks and fir trees as an aggressively swaggering army of points and spikes.
Looking at Expressionist Landscapes
When confronted by Expressionist art, it's worth thinking about the quality of the feeling the painter tries to express. Do the colors and composition of the work convey anxiety, anger, fear, sexual frustration, despair? Later works from the school display feelings of peace and acceptance.
The viewer should look not only at the facial expressions and physical dispositions of the human figures in the art but at nature, too. The sky and the sea, the mountain and the country lane--are they laughing or screaming?
