Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.

Expressionism is an International movement in art and architecture, which flourished between 1905 and 1920, especially in Germany It also extended to literature, music, dance and theatre. The term was originally applied more widely to various avant-garde movements: for example it was adopted as an alternative to the use of ‘Post-Impressionism’ by Roger Fry in exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912. It was also used contemporaneously in Scandinavia and Germany, being gradually confined to the specific groups of artists and architects to which it is now applied Expressionism in the fine arts developed from the Symbolist and expressive trends in European art at the end of the 19th century. The period of ‘classical Expressionism’ began in 1905, with the foundation of the group Die Brucke, and ended c 1920 Although in part an artistic reaction both to academic art and to Impressionism, the movement should be understood as a form of ‘new Humanism’, which sought to communicate man’s spiritual life It reflected the deep lectual unrest 1900, reflected in contemporary literary sources, about the destruction of the traditional relationship of trust between man and the world.

Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.

The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.

Definition
The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century entailed numerous political, social and cultural changes: on the one hand, the failure of the Paris Commune meant the political and economic boom of the bourgeoisie, which lived in the last decades of the nineteenth century a moment of great splendor, reflected in modernism, artistic movement put at the service of luxury and ostentation unfolded by the new ruling class. However, the revolutionary processes carried out since the French Revolution and the fear of being repeated again led the political classes to make a series of concessions, such as labor reforms, social insurance and compulsory basic education. Thus, the decline of illiteracyled to an increase in the media and a greater spread of cultural phenomena, which gained greater reach and rapidity of dissemination, and the “mass culture” arose.

On the other hand, the technical advances, especially in the field of art, the appearance of photography and cinema, led the artist to consider the function of their work, which no longer consisted in imitating reality, since the new techniques did it in a more objective, easy and reproducible way. Also, new scientific theories led the artists to question the objectivity of the world we perceive: the theory of relativity of Einstein, the psychoanalysis of Freud and the subjectivity of the time of Bergson provoked that the artist moves away overcome the reality. Thus, the search for new artistic languages and new forms of expression entailed the emergence of the movements of ‘Vanguard, which represented a new relationship between the artist and the viewer: avant-garde artists sought to integrate art with life, with society, to make their work an expression of the collective unconscious of society that it represents At the same time, the interaction with the viewer causes that this one is involved in the perception and understanding of the work, as well as in its diffusion and mercantilization, factor that will lead to an increase of the galleries of art and the museums.

Expressionism is part of the so-called historical avant-garde, that is, those produced from the first years of the 20th century, in the atmosphere prior to the First World War, and the end of the Second World War. This denomination also includes Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Neoclasticism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. The vanguard is intimately linked to the concept of modernity, characterized by the end of determinism and the supremacy of religion, replaced by reason and science, objectivism and individualism, trust in technology and progress, in the own capacities of the human being. Thus, the artists try to put themselves at the head of the social progress, to express through their work the evolution of the contemporary human being.

The term expressionism was used for the first time by the French painter Julien-Auguste Hervé, who referred to expressionism to designate a series of paintings presented at the Hall of Independents of Paris in 1901, as opposed to Impressionism. The German term expressionismus was directly adapted from French, as the expression in German is ausdruck – and was used for the first time in the catalog of the XXII Exhibition of the Secession of Berlin in 1911, which included both works by German and French artists. In literature, he was applied for the first time in 1911 by the criticKurt Hiller. Later, the term expressionism was spread by writer Herwarth Walden, editor of the magazine Der Sturm (The Storm), which became the main center of diffusion of German Expressionism. Walden initially applied the term to all the avant-gardes that arose between 1910 and 1920. Instead, the application of the term expressionism linked exclusively to avant-garde German art was the idea of Paul Fechter in his book Der Expressionismus (1914), which, following the theories of WorringerRelate the new artistic manifestations as an expression of the German collective soul.

Expressionism arose as a reaction to Impressionism: as well as the Impressionists plotted on the canvas an “impression” of the surrounding world, a simple reflection of the senses, the expressionists intended to reflect their inner world, an “expression” of their own feelings. Thus, the expresionistas use the line and the color in a temperamental and emotional way, with strong symbolic content. This reaction to Impressionism meant a strong break with the art created by the preceding generation, and converted expressionism into a synonym of modern art during the early twentieth century. Expressionism implied a new concept of art, understood as a way of capturing existence, of translating images into the substratum that exists under the apparent reality, reflecting the immutable and eternal nature of human beings and nature. Thus, expressionism was the starting point of a process of transmutation of reality that crystallized in abstract expressionism and informalism. Expressionists used art as a way of reflecting their feelings, their mood, generally prone to melancholy, evocation, to a neo-romantic decadent. Thus, art was a catharic experience, which purified the spiritual flaws, the artist’s angst.

In the genesis of expressionism, a fundamental factor was the rejection of positivism, scientific progress, belief in the unlimited possibilities of human beings based on science and technology. Instead, a new climate of pessimism, skepticism, displeasure, criticism, loss of values began to be generated. There was a crisis in human development, which was effectively confirmed by the outbreak of the First World War. Also noteworthy in Germany rejecting the imperialist regime of Wilhelm II by an intellectual minority, drowned by the militarism pangermanista Kaiser. These factors favored a culture broth in which expressionism was gradually growing, the first manifestations of which were produced in the field of literature: Frank Wedekind denounced bourgeois morality in his works, against which he opposed passionate freedom of instincts; Georg Trakl was taken away from reality taking refuge in a spiritual world created by the artist; Heinrich Mann was the one who most directly denounced the Guillermin society.

The emergence of expressionism in a country like Germany was not a random event, but was explained by the deep study devoted to art during the 19th century by German philosophers, artists and theorists, from romanticism and multiple contributions In the field of the aesthetics of characters such as Wagner and Nietzsche, to the cultural aesthetics and the work of authors such as Konrad Fiedler (On the valuation of works of visual art, 1876), Theodor Lipps (Aesthetics, 1903- 1906) and Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908). This theoretical current left a deep push in the German artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing mainly on the need to express themselves from the artist (inner Drang or inner necessity, a principle that I later assumed Kandinski), as well as the discovery of a rupture between the artist and the outside world, the environment that surrounds him, which makes him an introverted and alienated being of society. It also influenced the change produced in the cultural environment of the time, which moved away from the greco-Roman classical taste to admire popular, primitive and exotic art – especially Africa, Oceania and the Far East – as well as art medievaland the work of artists like Grünewald, Brueghel and El Greco.

In Germany, expressionism was more a theoretical concept, an ideological proposal, than a collective artistic program, although a stylistic seal common to all its members is appreciated. Faced with the academicism prevailing in the official artistic centers, the expressionists grouped around several centers for the dissemination of the new art, especially in cities such as Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Hannover and Dresden. However, his diffusion work through publications, galleries and exhibitions helped spread the new style throughout Germany and, later, throughout Europe. It was a heterogeneous movement that, apart from the diversity of its manifestations, realized in various languages and artistic media, presented numerous differences and even contradictions in its own right, with great stylistic and thematic divergence between the various groups that emerged throughout the time, and even between the same artists who integrated them. Even the chronological and geographic boundaries of this current are inaccurate: although the first expressionist generation (Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter) was the most emblematic, the new objectivityand the export of the movement to other countries supposed its continuity in the time at least until World War II; geographically, although the nerve center of this style was located in Germany, it soon extended to other European countries and ends of the American continent.

After the First World War, expressionism passed to Germany of painting in the cinema and the theater, which used the expressionist style in the scenery, but in a purely aesthetic way, devoid of its original meaning, tearing of expressionist painters, who, paradoxically, became malicious artists. With the advent of Nazism, expressionism was considered as “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst), relating it to communism and naming it as immoral and subversive, at the same time as considering that its Ugliness and artistic inferiority were a sign of the decline of modern art. In 1937, an exhibition was organized at the Hofgarten in Munich with the title precisely of Degenerate Art, in order to infamate it and show the public the low quality of the art produced in the Republic of Weimar. To this end, some 16,500 works from various museums, not only German artists, but also foreigners such as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Munch, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Chagall, etc. were confiscated. Most of these works were sold later to gallery owners and merchants, especially at a large auction held in Lucerne in 1939, although about 5,000 of these works were directly destroyed in March 1939, which meant a significant damage to German art.

After the Second World War, expressionism disappeared as a style, although it exerted a powerful influence on many artistic currents in the second half of the century, such as American abstract expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning), informalism (Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet), the CoBrA group (Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Corneille, Pierre Alechinsky) and neoexpressionismGerman – rightly inheriting by the artists of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, which is evident in his name -, and individual artists such as Francis Bacon, Antonio Saura, Bernard Buffet, Nicolas de Staël, Horst Antes, etc.

Origins and influences
Although the artistic movement developed in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century is known mainly by expressionism, many historians and art critics also use this term in a more generic way to describe the style of a wide variety of artists throughout the whole the History. Understood as the deformation of reality in search of a more emotional and subjective expression of nature and human beings, expressionism is then extrapolated at any time and geographical space. Thus, the work of several authors such as Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, Quentin Metsys, Pieter Brueghel el Vell, has often been described as expressionist,Francisco de Goya, Honoré Daumier, etc.

The roots of expressionism are found in styles such as symbolism and post-impressionism, as well as in nabis and artists such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. However, they have points of contact with neo-Impressionism and Fauvism for their experimentation with color. The expressionists received numerous influences: first of medieval art, especially the GothicGerman Of religious significance and transcendental character, medieval art emphasized expression, not in the forms: the figures had little corporeity, losing interest in reality, proportions, perspective. Instead, he emphasized the expression, especially the look: the characters were symbolized more than represented. Thus, the expressionists inspired the main artists of the German Gothic, developed by two fundamental schools: the international style (late fourteenth – first half of the fifteenth), represented by Conrad Soest and Stefan Lochner ; and the flamenco style (second half of the 15th century), developed by Konrad Witz,Martin Schongauer and Hans Holbein el Vell. They also inspired the German Gothic sculpture, which was noted for its great expressiveness, with names such as Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemenschneider. Another point of reference was Matthias Grünewald, a late-medieval painter who even knew the innovations of the Renaissance followed in a personal line, characterized by emotional intensity, an expressive formal distortion and an intense colorful incandescent, as in his masterpiece, the altarpiece of Issenheim.

Another of the references of expressionist art was primitive art, especially that of Africa and Oceania, which has been disseminated since the end of the 19th century by ethnographic museums. The artistic avant-gardes found in primitive art a greater freedom of expression, originality, new forms and materials, a new conception of volume and color, as well as a greater transcendence of the object, since in these cultures they were not simple works of art, but had a religious, magical, totemic, votive, sumptuary purpose, etc. They are objects that express a direct communication with nature, as well as with spiritual forces, with cults and rituals, without any mediation or interpretation.

But his greatest inspiration came from post-impressionism, especially the work of three artists: Paul Cézanne, who began a process of defragmentation of reality in geometric shapes that led to Cubism, reducing shapes to cylinders, cones and spheres, and Dissolving the volume from the most essential points of the composition. Layered color, overlapping colors with others, without needing lines, working with stains. He did not use perspective, but the overlay of warm and cold tones gave a sensation of depth. Second Paul Gauguin, which provided a new conception between the pictorial plane and the depth of the painting, with flat and arbitrary colors, which have a symbolic and decorative value, with scenes of difficult classification, located between reality and a dreamlike and magical world. His stay in Tahiti provoked his work to lead to a certain primitivism, influenced by ocean art, reflecting the interior world of the artist instead of imitating reality. Lastly, Vincent Van Gogh, that elaborated his work according to criteria of exaltation, characterized by the lack of perspective, the instability of objects and colors, that rubbish arbitrariness, without imitating reality, but coming from the interior of the ” artist Due to her fragile mental health, her works are a reflection of her mood, depression and torture, which is reflected in works of sinuous brushstrokes and violent colors.

Ultimately, it is worth mentioning the influence of two artists that Expressionists regarded as immediate precedents: Norwegian Edvard Munch, influenced at the beginning by Impressionism and Symbolism, soon led to a personal style that would be a true reflection of his Obsessive and tortured interior, with scenes of an oppressive and enigmatic environment, focusing on sex, illness and death, characterized by the sinuosity of the composition and a strong and arbitrary color. The angry and desperate images of Munch -com The Cry (1893), paradigm of loneliness and lack of communication- were one of the main points of start of expressionism. Equally influential was the work of the Belgian James Ensor, which picked up the great artistic tradition of his country – in particular, Brueghel -, with preference for popular themes, translating it into enigmatic and irreverent scenes, of an absurd and burlesque character, with a sense of humor, acid and corrosive, centered In figures of wanderers, drunkards, skeletons, masks and carnival scenes. Thus, The entrance of Christ to Brussels (1888) represents the passion of Jesus in the middle of a carnival parade, a work that caused a great scandal at the time.

In other arts
The Expressionist movement included other types of culture, including dance, sculpture, cinema and theatre.

Dance
The dance expressionist (German, Ausdruckstanz) arose in the context of the new innovation pioneering spirit brought to art, and was reflected as other artistic manifestations of a new way of understanding artistic expression. As in the rest of artistic disciplines, expressionist dance meant a break with the past, in this case, the classical ballet, looking for new forms of expression based on the freedom of body gesture, released from metric and rhythm ligaments, where the body’s self-expression and the relationship with space become more relevant. In parallel to the naturist claim that occurred in the expressionist art, especially in Die Brücke, expressionist dance claimed bodily freedom, at the same time that Freud’s new psychological theories influenced a greater introspection in the mind of the artist. artist, which was translated into an attempt by the dance to express the interior, to liberate the human being from repressions.

Expressionist dance coincided with Der Blaue Reiter in his spiritual concept of the world, trying to capture the essence of reality and transcend it. They rejected the classic concept of beauty, and this is expressed in a more abrupt and rough dynamism than that of classical dance. At the same time, they accepted the most negative aspect of the human being, which subjugated in his unconscious but which is part of his indissoluble. Expressionist dance did not prevent itself from showing the darkest place of the individual, his fragility, his suffering, his unbelief. This translates into a more contracted corporality, in an expressiveness that includes the whole body, or even in the preference to dance barefoot, which is a greater contact with reality, with nature.

Expressionist dance was also called expressive dance and abstract dance, as it implied a liberation of the movement, far from the metric and the rhythm, parallel to the abandonment of figuration by painting, at the same time as the its claim to express through movement ideas or states of mind coincided with the term spiritual work abstract Kandinsky. In spite of everything, the inescapable presence of the human body provoked a certain contradiction in the denomination of an “abstract” current within the dance.

Rudolf von Laban was a theoretician of the movement who created a system that sought to integrate body and soul, emphasizing the energy emanating from the bodies, and analyzing the movement and its relationship with space. The contributions of Laban allowed dancers a new multidirectionality in relation to the surrounding space, while the movement freed himself from the rhythm, giving equal importance to silence than to music. Laban also tried to escape from gravity deliberately seeking the loss of balance. However, he tried to move away from the rigid aspect of the classical ballet by promoting the dynamic and natural movement of the dancer.

Sculpture
The sculpture expressionist did not have a common stylistic stamp and was the product of several individual artists reflecting on their work or thematic or formal distortion characteristic of expressionism. In particular, there are three names:

Ernst Barlach: inspired by the Russian folk art – after a trip to the Slavic country in 1906 – and the German medieval sculpture, as well as Brueghel and Bosch, his works have a certain caricaturesc air, working much on the volume, the depth and articulation of the movement. He developed two main themes: the popular (everyday customs, peasant scenes) and, especially after the war, fear, anguish, terror. He did not imitate reality, but created a new reality, playing with broken lines and angles, with anatomies distanced from naturalism, tending towards geometry. He worked preferably in wood and plaster, that sometimes passed later to the bronze. Among his works include: El fugitivo (1920-1925), El venjador (1922), La muerte en la vida (1926), El flautista (1928), El bebedor (1933), Vella fredolica (1939), etc.
Wilhelm Lehmbruck: educated in Paris, his work has a marked classicist character, although deformed and stylized, and with a strong introspective and emotional burden. During his training in Düsseldorf, he evolved from a naturalism of sentimental roots, through a Baroque dramatism with influence by Rodin, to a realism influenced by Meunier. In 1910 he settled in Paris, where he accused Maillol’s influence. Lastly, after a trip to Italy in 1912 began a greater geometry and stylization of the anatomy, with some medieval influence in the extension of the figures (Kneeling woman, 1911; Young man standing up, 1913).
Käthe Kollwitz: The wife of a doctor from a poor neighborhood in Berlin, knew about human misery, which marked her deeply. Socialist and feminist, his work has a marked component of social demand, with sculptures, lithographs and etchings that stand out for his cruelty: The Weavers’ revolt (1907-1908), The war of the peasants (1902-1908), Homage to Karl Liebknecht (1919-1920).

Cinema
Expressionism did not reach the cinema until the First World War, when it had practically disappeared as an artistic current, and was replaced by New Objectivity. However, the emotional expressiveness and formal distortion of expressionism had a perfect translation of the cinematographic language, especially thanks to the contribution made by the expressionist theater, whose stage innovations were adapted with great success to the cinema. Expressionist cinema went through several stages: from pure expressionism – sometimes called causticism- He went to a certain neo-romanticism (Murnau), and from this to critical realism (Pabst, Siodmak, Lupu Pick), to end Lang’s syncretism and the idealistic naturalism of Kammerspielfilm. Among the main expressionist directors, we should emphasize Leopold Jessner, Robert Wiene, Paul Wegener, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Fritz Lang, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Paul Leni, Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Lupu Pick, Robert Siodmak, Arthur Robison and Ewald André Dupont.

Expressionist cinema imposed on the screen a subjective style that offered in images an expressive deformation of reality, translated in dramatic terms by means of the distortion of scenery, makeup, etc., and the consequent recreation of terrorist atmospheres or, at least, disturbing. Expressionist cinema is characterized by its recurrence to the symbolism of forms, deliberately distorted with the support of different plastic elements. Expressionist aesthetics took the themes of genres such as fantasy and terror, a moral reflection of the adverse social and political imbalance that stirred the Weimar Republic over those years. With strong influence of Romanticism, expressionist cinema reflected a vision of the individual characteristic of the soul ” Faustian»German: he showed the dual human nature, his fascination for evil, the fatality of life subject to the power of destiny. It can be pointed out as expressionist cinema aims to symbolically translate, through lines, forms or volumes, the mentality of the characters, their mood, their intentions, in such a way that the decoration appears as the plastic translation of the his drama This symbolism raised more or less conscious psychic reactions that guided the spectator’s spirit.

Literature

Journals
Two leading Expressionist journals published in Berlin were Der Sturm, published by Herwarth Walden starting in 1910, and Die Aktion, which first appeared in 1911 and was edited by Franz Pfemfert. Der Sturm published poetry and prose from contributors such as Peter Altenberg, Max Brod, Richard Dehmel, Alfred Döblin, Anatole France, Knut Hamsun, Arno Holz, Karl Kraus, Selma Lagerlöf, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Paul Scheerbart, and René Schickele, and writings, drawings, and prints by such artists as Kokoschka, Kandinsky, and members of Der blaue Reiter.

Drama
Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 playlet, Murderer, The Hope of Women is often termed the first expressionist drama. In it, an unnamed man and woman struggle for dominance. The man brands the woman; she stabs and imprisons him. He frees himself and she falls dead at his touch. As the play ends, he slaughters all around him (in the words of the text) “like mosquitoes.” The extreme simplification of characters to mythic types, choral effects, declamatory dialogue and heightened intensity all would become characteristic of later expressionist plays. The German composer Paul Hindemith created an operatic version of this play, which premiered in 1921.

Expressionism was a dominant influence on early 20th-century German theatre, of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge, Walter Hasenclever, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Arnolt Bronnen. Important precursors were the Swedish playwright August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank Wedekind. During the 1920s, Expressionism enjoyed a brief period of popularity in American theatre, including plays by Eugene O’Neill (The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones and The Great God Brown), Sophie Treadwell (Machinal) and Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine).

Poetry
The lyrical expressionist developed significantly in the years before the First World War, a topic wide and varied, focusing mainly on urban reality, but renewed respect for traditional poetry, assuming aesthetics of ugly, evil, deformed, grotesque, apocalyptic, desolate, as a new form of expression of expressionist language. The new themes treated by German poets are life in the big city, loneliness and lack of communication, madness, alienation, anguish, existential void, disease and death, sex and the premonition of war. Several of these authors, aware of the decline of society and their need for renewal, used a prophetic, idealistic, utopian language, a certain messianismwhich advocated granting a new meaning to life, a regeneration of the human being, a greater universal fraternity.

Stylistically, the expressionist poetry language is concise, penetrating, nude, with a pathetic and desolate tone, putting communication expressiveness, without linguistic or syntactic rules. They sought the essentials of language, liberate the word, accentuating the rhythmic strength of language through linguistic deformation, the substantivation of verbs and adjectives and the introduction of neologisms. However, they maintain the traditional metric and rhyme, and sonnet is one of their main means of composition, although they also resort to free rhythm and stanzapolymmetric Another effect of the dynamic expressionist language was simultaneity, the perception of space and time as something subjective, heterogeneous, atomized, unconnected, a simultaneous presentation of images and events. The main expressionist poets were Franz Werfel, Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn, Georg Heym, Johannes R. Becher, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ernst Stadler, Jakob van Hoddis and August Stramm. However, expressionism exerted a great influence on the work of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Prose
In prose, the early stories and novels of Alfred Döblin were influenced by Expressionism, and Franz Kafka is sometimes labelled an Expressionist. Some further writers and works that have been called Expressionist include:

Music
The term expressionism “was probably first applied to music in 1918, especially to Schoenberg”, because like the painter Kandinsky he avoided “traditional forms of beauty” to convey powerful feelings in his music. Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the members of the Second Viennese School, are important Expressionists (Schoenberg was also an expressionist painter). Other composers that have been associated with expressionism are Krenek (the Second Symphony), Paul Hindemith (The Young Maiden), Igor Stravinsky (Japanese Songs), Alexander Scriabin (late piano sonatas) (Adorno 2009, 275). Another significant expressionist was Béla Bartók in early works, written in the second decade of the 20th-century, such as Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), The Wooden Prince (1917), and The Miraculous Mandarin (1919). Important precursors of expressionism are Richard Wagner (1813–83), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), and Richard Strauss (1864–1949).

Theodor Adorno describes expressionism as concerned with the unconscious, and states that “the depiction of fear lies at the centre” of expressionist music, with dissonance predominating, so that the “harmonious, affirmative element of art is banished” (Adorno 2009, 275–76). Erwartung and Die Glückliche Hand, by Schoenberg, and Wozzeck, an opera by Alban Berg (based on the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner), are examples of Expressionist works. If one were to draw an analogy from paintings, one may describe the expressionist painting technique as the distortion of reality (mostly colors and shapes) to create a nightmarish effect for the particular painting as a whole. Expressionist music roughly does the same thing, where the dramatically increased dissonance creates, aurally, a nightmarish atmosphere.

Architecture
In architecture, two specific buildings are identified as Expressionist: Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion of the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914), and Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany completed in 1921. The interior of Hans Poelzig’s Berlin theatre (the Grosse Schauspielhaus), designed for the director Max Reinhardt, is also cited sometimes. The influential architectural critic and historian Sigfried Giedion, in his book Space, Time and Architecture (1941), dismissed Expressionist architecture as a part of the development of functionalism. In Mexico, in 1953, German émigré Mathias Goeritz, published the Arquitectura Emocional (“Emotional Architecture”) manifesto with which he declared that “architecture’s principal function is emotion”. Modern Mexican architect Luis Barragán adopted the term that influenced his work. The two of them collaborated in the project Torres de Satélite (1957–58) guided by Goeritz’s principles of Arquitectura Emocional. It was only during the 1970s that Expressionism in architecture came to be re-evaluated more positively.

Photography
The photograph expressionist developed mainly during the Weimar Republic, and was one of the main focuses of avant-garde European photography. The new German postwar society, for its quasi-utopian eagerness to regenerate the country after the disasters of war, resorted to a relatively new technique such as photography to break with the bourgeois tradition and build a new social model based on the colossal, laboration between social classes. The photography of the 1920s was the heiress of the anti-war photomontages created by the Dadaists during the war, and also took advantage of the experience of photographers from Eastern Europe who came to Germany after the war, which would lead to the elaboration Of a type of photography of great quality, both technical and artistic.

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