The difference between Expressionism and Fauvism

The difference between Expressionism and Fauvism is chiefly one of mood. Both use strong, unreal colours and simplified forms around 1905. Fauvism, with Henri Matisse in Paris, wanted colour to bring harmony, light and joy, and the movement lasted only a few years. Expressionism, above all in Germany with Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, used colour and distorted forms to express unease, anguish and spiritual truths, and it shaped art for several decades.

Facts

The same year, different cities

In the autumn of 1905 Henri Matisse and his friends showed paintings in blazing pure colour at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. A critic saw a classical sculpture in the same room and wrote that it was like Donatello among the wild beasts, les fauves. The name stuck. The same year four architecture students in Dresden, among them Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, formed the group Die Brücke, the bridge, which became the start of German Expressionism.

The two movements thus developed in parallel and had the same models: van Gogh and Gauguin, who had shown that colour need not describe reality. But they drew different conclusions. See the period the avant-garde.

Fauvism: colour as joy

The Fauves painted a face green or a tree red, not to shock but so that the colours would work powerfully together. In 1908 Matisse wrote that he dreamed of an art of balance, purity and calm, something that could soothe the mind like a good armchair. The pictures are often bright, with landscapes by the Mediterranean, interiors and people at rest.

The Dance of 1910 was painted after the Fauve years but shows their idea clearly: five red figures dance in a ring against blue and green, with only three colours and large areas. The movement is full of energy but not of unease. The ring is broken where two hands almost meet, and that is where the tension lies. Read the guide to Fauvism and to complementary colours, which the Fauves used deliberately.

Expressionism: colour as feeling

The German Expressionists used the same free colour but to show the inner life. Kirchner's street scenes from Berlin have pointed, angular figures in acid colours, and the big city becomes menacing and nervous. Emil Nolde painted glowing flowers and religious scenes with coarse brushstrokes. In Munich Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc formed the group Der Blaue Reiter in 1911, and for them colour was a spiritual language; Kandinsky went on from there to abstraction.

The most important model was Edvard Munch. His The Scream of 1893 shows a figure holding its ears under a blood-red sky, and the lines of the landscape ripple through the body. There is no joy in the colour, only a feeling that takes over the world. In Vienna Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele went in the same direction. See German Expressionism and the guide to Expressionism.

The Dance versus The Scream

Put The Dance and The Scream side by side in Compare. Both simplify form, both have strong colours and rippling lines. But in Matisse the surface is flat and calm, the colours are few and clear, and the figures are body and rhythm. In Munch the space is distorted, with a bridge plunging into the picture, the colours are piercing and the figure almost a skeleton.

Fauvism asks how colours can work together. Expressionism asks how it feels. That is why Fauvism was short-lived: as early as 1908 Matisse went his own way and Georges Braque moved towards Cubism. Expressionism continued through the First World War and the 1920s and found new life in Abstract Expressionism after 1945.

A Swedish link: Sigrid Hjertén

Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald studied in 1909–1911 at the school Matisse ran in Paris, together with several other Scandinavians. They took the pure colour of Fauvism home to Stockholm, but in Hjertén's pictures it became something else. Studio Interior of 1916 has Matisse's flat fields of colour, but the room tilts, the surfaces collide and the mood between the people is tense.

She is therefore called both a Fauve and an Expressionist, and both words are right: the technique comes from Paris, the feeling from Expressionism. The group around them is called the Young Ones; read about The Young Ones and the breakthrough of Modernism.

How to tell which it is

Ask yourself what the colour is doing. If it gives light, warmth and balance, and the forms are soft and the areas large, it is probably Fauvism. If the colours clash, the contours are angular, the faces distorted and the mood uneasy, it is probably Expressionism.

Then ask where and when. Fauvism belongs to Paris and the south of France in 1905–1908. Expressionism belongs mainly to Dresden, Berlin, Munich and Vienna from 1905 and for several decades after. The guide Impressionism and Expressionism shows how Expressionism differs from what came before.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

What did Matisse want his art to give the viewer?