Art & Music - Expressionism...4/4

An inner evolution

The birth of the 20^th century saw European society embrace the existence of the subconscious and the desire to explore its depths.

  The expressionist movement, in art, music and literature, encompasses attempts by various artists to depict this exploration and our ‘inner necessity’.  A reaction to the increased mechanization of society, a pervasive bourgeois attitude to life, and a fascination with the emerging field of psychology fuelled this highly diverse, highly personal movement.

The ‘War to End All Wars’ profoundly changed the nature of expressionism.  Still a personal expression of inner emotion, the movement took on a political consciousness.  The trend which had begun in Austria and Germany with the work of artists like James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, emerged even more strongly after World War I in the work of Max Beckmann and George Grosz.

Degenerative art

As artists, and indeed people everywhere, struggled to make sense of the brutality and horrors of war, the urge to plumb the depths of the human subconscious was all-encompassing.  

German expressionism was split into two factions: artists who were more socially and politically conscious developed groups like Die Brücke, whereas artists of a more spiritual bent were incorporated by Kandinsky and his group, Der Blaue Reiter.  Schoenberg, Webern and Berg who became known as the 2^nd Viennese School, explored a musical interpretation of expressionism: suffering through dissonance.  The movement grew in scope and popularity until it was banned by the Nazis in the 1930s, accused of being a ‘degenerative art form’.

A new millennium

As we enter the 21^st century we still struggle with the expression of our inner conflicts.  Psychology is firmly established in popular culture and the self-help tendency indicates a common desire to understand our human condition, at the very least at a surface level.  In western society, where religion has an increasingly tenuous foothold, perhaps we feel compelled to fill the void that the expressionist artists, composers, writers and philosophers of the early 20^th century were attempting to reveal. 

In 2016 this desire to explore our collective subconscious and reveal our psychological secrets is the result of a greater societal shift begun over 100 years ago.  Individually we respond to the expressive power of internal subjective experience and perhaps it’s this cultural resonance that is the key to expressionist art’s popularity today. 

The human condition

To contemplate the horror of Munch’s The Scream or to endure the disconnected musical suffering of Schoenberg’s woman in Erwartung is to gaze into an abyss of human suffering, anxiety, wonder and fear.  We are compelled by our humanity as expressionism reflects it back to us.

(This is the next in a series created for the Fuschia Tree's art magazine, Artitude, exploring the inter-relatedness of art and music.)