Expressionism, a European cultural movement born in the early 1900s, was the revolution of language that opposed the subjectivity of Impressionism its subjectivity.
The bases of expressionist poetics are the soul of the artist to reality, without mediation, are the “eyes of the soul” that induce the rebellion of the spirit against matter.
In the expressionist current, one finds the communicative concept of art that had been lost in previous currents. In fact, it is presented as an intermediary role between the artist and the world.
The expressionist movement, in addition to the acclaimed figurative arts, involves the whole world of art. From literature to architecture, from theater to cinema to music.
In painting, the expressionist artist expresses his mood, his emotions. He is no longer a simple objective player of reality but expresses his own feelings and ideas. Communicate emotions through the choice of colors, styles, and artistic gestures. In fact, Paul Gauguin and Vincet van Gogh paintings already find the principles of lines and colors according to the state of mind, which painters defined as precursors of expressionism.
Among the other precursors, one can not but mention the painter Edward Munch, “The Scream” is his famous work and the best-known one who communicates the state of anxiety that accompanied the painter throughout his life and represents his experience of Lived view,
“One night, I walked on a path, on one side was the city and under me the fjord I was tired and sick I stopped and looked over the fjord – the sun was setting – the clouds were dyed of a red blood I felt a scream through nature: I almost seemed to hear it. I painted this artwork, painted the clouds as true blood, and the colors were screaming. ” Edvard Munch
Short bio of Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. He attends Oslo’s bohème (artistic movement) environment in the midst of his cultural ferment (do not forget that Henrik Ibsen himself took part). After completing the Academy, he goes to Paris (1885), where he learns from Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, who, if at his first Paris exhibition scandalizes the whole public on the one hand, on the other he attracts However a small fringe of young artists. The use of colors, the power of his reds, the violent lucidity with which he deals with his themes, will lead him to be the forerunner, if not the first of the expressionist.
In 1892 Munch exhibited in Berlin some fifty of his paintings and the criticism of the criticism is so drastic that after one week the exhibition is suspended. Munch’s stay in Berlin lasted until 1908, interrupted only by a short trip to Paris in 1895. Fame does not give him happiness; Tries to undermine sensitivity with alcohol abuse. The period is troubled and is hospitalized in a nursing home for nerve diseases in Copenhagen.
In 1914 times were ripe for its art. Member of the German Academy of Arts and Honorary Member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Munich, in 1937, Munch knows the first Nazi persecution. The Hitler regime defined degenerate 82 works by the artist exposed in the various public museums in Germany and sells it.
When he died of pneumonia, in 1944, he left all his belongings and his works to the city hall of the capital. Over 1100 paintings were ruined, because Munch deliberately left them outdoors for a treatment he called “horse care.”
Oslo in 1963, on the occasion of its centenary of birth, devotes a dedicated museum: the Munch Museum (Munch Museet), located in the Tøyen district. In the museum is also the series The frieze of life that Munch realized around the end of the nineteenth century, huge canvases where the artist tries to communicate his final vision of life, understood as the regeneration of love and death.
