Expressionism

A German movement in literature and the other arts (espe-cially the visual arts) which was at its height between 1910 and 1925—that is, in the period just before, during, and after World War I. Its chief precursors were artists and writers who had in various ways departed from realistic de-pictions of life and the world, by incorporating in their art visionary or powerfully emotional states of mind that are expressed and transmitted by means of distorted representations of the outer world. Among these precursors in painting were Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and the Norwegian Edvard Munch—Munch's lithograph The Cry (1894) depicting, against a bleak and stylized background, a tense figure with a contorted face uttering a scream of pure horror, is often taken to epitomize what became the expressionist mode. Prominent among the literary precursors of the movement in the nineteenth century were the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and above all the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. Expressionism itself was never a concerted or well-defined movement.

It can be said, however, that its central feature is a revolt against the artistic and literary tradition of realism, both in subject matter and in style. The expressionist artist or writer undertakes to express a personal vision—usually a troubled or tensely emotional vision—of human life and human society. This is done by exaggerating and distorting what, according to the norms of artistic realism, are objective features of the world, and by embodying violent ex-tremes of mood and feeling. Often the work implies that what is depicted or described represents the experience of an individual standing alone and afraid in an industrial, technological, and urban society which is disintegrating into chaos. Expressionists who were radical in their politics also projected Utopian views of a future community in a regenerate world. Expressionist painters tended to use jagged lines to depict contorted objects and forms, as well as to substitute arbitrary, often lurid colors, for natural hues; among these painters were Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Oskar Kokoschka, and, for a time, Wassily Kandinsky.

Expressionist poets (including the Ger-mans Gottfried Benn and Georg Trakl) departed from standard meter, syntax, and poetic structure to organize their works around symbolic images. Expressionist writers of prose narratives (most eminently Franz Kafka) abandoned standard modes of characterization and plot for symbolic figures involved in an obsessive world of nightmarish events. Drama was a prominent and widely influential form of expressionist writ-ing. Among the better-known German playwrights were Georg Kaiser (Gas, From Morn to Midnight), Ernst Toller (Mass Man), and in his earlier productionBertolt Brecht. Expressionist dramatists tended to represent anonymous human types instead of individualized characters, to replace plot by episodic renderings of intense and rapidly oscillating emotional states, often to fragment the dia-logue into exclamatory and seemingly incoherent sentences or phrases, and to employ masks and abstract or lopsided and sprawling stage sets.

The producer Max Reinhardt, although not himself in the movement, directed a number of plays by Strindberg and by German expressionists; in them he inaugurated such modern devices as the revolving stage and special effects in lighting and sound. This mode of German drama had an important influence on the American theater. Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920) projected, in a sequence of sym-bolic episodes, the individual and racial memories of a terrified modern African-American protagonist, and Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923) used nonrealistic means to represent a mechanical, sterile, and frightening world as experienced by Mr. Zero, a tiny and helpless cog in the impersonal system of big business. The flexible possibilities of the medium made the motion picture an important vehicle of German expressionism.

Robert Wiene's early expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)—representing, in ominously distorted settings, the machinations of the satanic head of an insane asylum—as well as Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) are often shown in current revivals of films. Expressionism had begun to flag by 1925 and was finally suppressed in Germany by the Nazis in the early 1930s, but it has continued to exert influence on English and American, as well as European, art and literature. We recognize its effects, direct or indirect, on the writing and staging of such plays as Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth and Arthur Miller's Death of a Sales-man, as well as on the theater of the absurd; on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers; on the prose fiction of Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon; and on a number of films, manifest-ing the distorted perceptions and fantasies of disturbed characters, by such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni.