The difference between Impressionism and Expressionism

Impressionism, which arose in France in the 1870s, tries to capture how light and colour look at a single moment. Expressionism, which broke through in Germany around 1905, instead wants to express an inner feeling and therefore distorts forms and colours. One paints the impression from outside, the other the expression from within.

Facts

Impression and expression

The names say most of it. Impression is what reaches the eye: the Impressionists wanted to capture how the world appears in a particular light, at a particular second. Their pictures are about sunlight on water, mist over a harbour or shadows on a boulevard.

Expression is what comes from within. The Expressionists cared less about how something looked and more about what it felt like. A sky could be blood-red and a face green if it conveyed anxiety, ecstasy or anger. Where Impressionism is an art about seeing, Expressionism is an art about feeling.

Impressionism: light in the moment

Impressionism took shape in Paris and was named after Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise at the group's first exhibition in 1874. The painters liked to work outdoors, with bright colours and quick strokes, and depicted leisure, cities and landscapes.

The mood is usually light and pleasant. Renoir painted dancing in the sunshine and Morisot quiet moments at home. Even when Degas depicts tired dancers, his gaze is observant, not agitated. Read more in the guide to Impressionism.

Expressionism: feeling in colour

In 1905 four architecture students in Dresden, among them Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, founded the artists' group Die Brücke. They painted with sharp, often unmixed colours, angular forms and coarse outlines, and they revived the woodcut. In 1911 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, with a more spiritual orientation.

In the same year, 1905, Henri Matisse and his friends caused a stir at the Salon d'Automne in Paris with colours so strong that a critic called them fauves, wild beasts. In Vienna Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka painted nervous, emaciated bodies. Read more about the period under German Expressionism.

The bridge between them: van Gogh and Munch

The road from one to the other ran through Post-Impressionism. Vincent van Gogh started from Impressionism's colours but let his brushstrokes swirl with emotion, and in The Scream of 1893 Edvard Munch painted an anxiety that seems to fill the whole landscape. Both became models for the young Expressionists in Germany.

That is why you sometimes see similar brushstrokes in a late Impressionist and an early Expressionist. The difference lies in the purpose: to show how something looks in the light, or to show how it feels inside.

Expressionism in Sweden and its fate

In Sweden the artists of the group De unga (The Young Ones), who exhibited from 1909, were influenced by Matisse and Expressionism. Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald painted in strong colours and simplified forms, as in Hjertén's Studio Interior of 1916. The period has its own page: The Young Ones and Expressionism.

In Germany Expressionism came to a brutal end. The Nazis branded it degenerate, and in 1937 works by Kirchner, Nolde and Marc among others were shown at the exhibition Entartete Kunst in Munich in order to be ridiculed. Many works were sold off or destroyed.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

Which artists' group was founded in Dresden in 1905?