Art & Music - Expressionism...1/4

An exploration of the subconscious 

Although we are more than a decade into the new millennium, who doesn’t remember the anticipated chaos and soul-searching that was attributed to “Y2K”? 

At the close of the 19^th Century, the art world suffered from the same fin-de-siècle angst; coupled with a burgeoning awareness of psychology and the subconscious, the results were explosive.

Depicting inner devastation

Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian painter, is generally credited with being the father of expressionism.  As impressionism developed as a reaction to the excesses of romanticism, expressionism grew up as its cyclical opposite.  The impressionists wanted to paint external authenticity; the expressionists wanted to expose the horrors within. 

Munch’s The Scream is an iconic example of this style of painting: a devastating ‘soul-painting’. Munch used colours and lines not taken from any external reality.  Instead the painting reflects a vision of Munch’s personal hell and his reaction to a century’s end and the coming apocalypse.

A move toward internal subjectivity

Although expressionism in visual art illustrates the artists’ journey, depicting external objectivity to internal subjectivity, in a broader sense this attitude was an undercurrent that ran through many aspects of late 19^th and early 20^th century European life.  It was reflected in the literary developments of the day and the writings of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Freud in particular.  It also exploded onto the classical music scene with composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his students, who constituted the 2^nd Viennese School.

Pierrot Lunaire is an evocative example of the expressionistic style of composition; a song-cycle packed with episodes of highly personal, emotional horror.  Schoenberg extricates his demons and writes music that exposes his inner fears to the listener just as we are able to read the artist’s personal anxiety on the face of the figure in Munch’s, The Scream.

Our inner angst

In art, as in life, artists and composers were fascinated with mapping the subconscious and revealing inner angst.  But what characterized this powerful new movement and how did one art form influence another?

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