Art & Music - Expressionism...2/4

Free the art form – free your mind...

Although the term ‘expressionism’ was coined by Czech art historian Antonín Matějček in 1910 to mean the opposite of impressionism, its roots can be traced back to painters like Edvard Munch (Munch’s The Scream was painted 17 years before the term was invented) and El Greco (1541-1614).  In the 20^th century the movement crystallized in Austria and Germany and picked up speed with a heavy emphasis on communication through the exploration of personal emotion. 

Artists and composers strove to express the subconscious or ‘inner necessity’ and employed distortion as a method of expression: composers evoked suffering through use of dissonance, whereas artists distorted visual reality to achieve an emotional effect.

Suffering through dissonance

Expressionist composers like Arnold Schoenberg, together with his student disciples, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, believed that to be truly expressive, music must be freed from the shackles of traditional tonality by self-consciously (in the sense of being self-aware) embracing atonality in their composition style.  Only this highly dissonant musical language could effectively express suffering and the human condition. 

Schoenberg’s piece, Erwartung, a short one-act monodrama for soprano and orchestra, is a classic example of atonality: the music is through-composed (free of thematic patterns) and the libretto is a stream of consciousness diatribe.  The psychological subject matter - a nameless woman searching for and finding her dead lover and then agonizing over the meaninglessness of her life - epitomizes the expressionistic exploration of angst.

Emotional abstraction

In expressionistic visual art, it was more important that the work accurately depict subjective, personal emotions rather than a veracious portrayal of external reality. This unifying motivation lies behind the varied and subjective painting techniques – Russian painter, Wassily Kandinsky is a well-known example of an artist who embraced expressionistic themes.

Works like his Composition IV became increasingly abstract and the figures distorted as he incorporated new, vivid colours, lines and shapes in his quest to free his art from traditional form and depict inner angst.  He was fascinated by ‘colour symbolism’ and the new field of psychology: art where colour is presented independently of form. As expressionist musicians composed atonal musical streams of consciousness, so Kandinsky’s painting reflects the free flow of unconscious thought.

Pushing boundaries

To both Kandinsky and Schoenberg – and characteristic of the expressionistic movement - communication through the use of authentic, personal emotion was far more important than an adherence to particular form.  As psychology and philosophy pushed the boundaries of the unconscious, expressionist art and music pushed the boundaries of conventional form.

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