Expressionism

Expressionism, early 20th-century movement in art and literature that held that art should be the expression of subjective feelings and emotions. Expressionist painters preferred intense coloring and primitive simplified forms, in that these seemed to convey emotions directly. Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch influenced the movement, which developed in both France and Germany after 1905. In France the style was represented by the fauvists Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault, and in Germany by Die Brücke and the Blaue Reiter artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Kirchner, and Franz Marc. Expressionist writers include August Strindberg, Frank Wedekind, and Franz Kafka.