Expressionism, in the visual arts, a movement or tendency that strives to express subjective feelings and emotions rather than to depict reality or nature objectively. The movement developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a reaction against the academic standards that had prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance (1300-1600), particularly in French and German art academies. In Expressionism the artist tries to present an emotional experience in its most compelling form. The artist is not concerned with reality as it appears but with its inner nature and with the emotions aroused by the subject. To achieve these ends, the subject is frequently caricatured, exaggerated, distorted, or otherwise altered in order to stress the emotional experience in its most intense and concentrated form. The movement had parallels in the contemporary development of Expressionist music and Expressionist literature and film.

Although the term Expressionism was not applied to painting until 1911, the qualities attributed to Expressionism are found in the art of almost every country and period. Some Chinese and Japanese art emphasizes the essential qualities of the subject rather than its physical appearance. In their work for Romanesque and early Gothic cathedrals, painters and sculptors of medieval Europe exaggerated forms and facial expressions to intensify the spiritual expressiveness of the subjects. Intense religious emotions expressed through distortion are also found in the 16th century in the works of El Greco and Matthias Grünewald. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch used violent colours and exaggerated lines as a means of expressing intense emotions.

The most important Expressionist group in the 20th century was that active in Germany. The German movement was originated by the painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who in 1905 organized a group in Dresden called Die Brücke (German, “The Bridge”). They were joined in 1906 by Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein and in 1910 by Otto Müller. In 1912 this group exhibited paintings along with a Munich group that called itself Der Blaue Reiter (German, “The Blue Rider”). The latter included the German painters Franz Marc, August Macke, and Heinrich Campendonk, the Swiss artist Paul Klee, and the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. This phase of Expressionism in Germany was marked by the conscious exposition of emotions and a heightened sense of the possibilities for expressive content. Die Brücke was dissolved by 1913, and World War I halted most group activity. The Fauves in France, as well as the French painter Georges Braque and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, at a certain period of their development, were influenced by Expressionism.

A new phase of German Expressionism called Die Neue Sachlichkeit (German, “The New Objectivity”) grew out of the disillusionment that followed World War I. Founded by Otto Dix and George Grosz, it was characterized both by a concern for social truths and by an attitude of satiric bitterness and cynicism. Expressionism meanwhile had become an international movement, and the influence of the Germans is seen in the works of such artists as Oskar Kokoschka, Georges Rouault, Chaïm Soutine, Jules Pascin, and Max Weber.

Abstract Expressionism developed in the United States after the end of World War II in 1945. Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock, attempted to transmit basic emotions through vivid colours, bold forms, and spontaneous methods of dripping and flinging paint—all without depicting any recognizable subject-matter.

Expressionist sculpture has its roots in the work of the 19th-century French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who expressed the inner states of his subjects within representational forms. He strongly influenced the work of his assistant Antoine Bourdelle, Ivan Meştrović, Jacob Epstein, and Ernst Barlach. The work of all these sculptors, in the medium of the human figure, involves various forms of distortion, such as exaggeration, elongation, and massiveness.