Style Definition
Expressionism was a style in the Western arts which straddled the latter
half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Until the 19th
century, the arts had been principally concerned with the depiction of
reality, and artists used emotion--their own or their subject's--as one
component of expression and not its guarantor. Expressionist art, by
contrast, dealt directly with the transmission of emotion. It was
subjective and incoherent rather than objective and precise. The urge
towards the overt expression of feeling began with the Romantic movement
at the end of the 18th century, but true expressionism was only
liberated a century later, when Freud's work made complexes, neuroses
and private obsessions acceptable subjects for polite study and for the
arts.
In architecture, expressionism was identified with the works of architects
in Germany, Holland and Scandinavia from the end of World War I until
the 1920s. The expressionist buildings are characterized by unusual
angular or organic forms and internal volumes, to some extent made
possible by the imaginative use of reinforced concrete. The historian
Pevsner saw the style as a deviation from the development of the
Modernist movement, working under the influence of Art Nouveau in the
political crisis following World War I. The prewar work most closely
identified with expressionism is probably that of Peter Behrens (1868 -
1940), particularly his factories for A.E.G. in Berlin (1908-1913), and
certainly the postwar work of Bauhaus, during the Weimar period, is felt
to have absorbed the principal features of expressionism, visually the
stark expressive simplicity and theoretically a sense of architecture's
ethical obligation, as a tool for raising social standards. The
best-known examples of postwar expressionist architecture are the
Chilehaus in Hamburg of 1923, the work of , Fritz Hoeger (1877 - 1949)
and the interior of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin of 1919 by ,
Hans Poelzig (1869 - 1936). Perhaps one of the most striking of all
buildings in the expressionist idiom was an early work of , Erich
Mendelson (1887 - 1953), the 'Einstenurm', an observatory tower, built
at Potsdam in 1920, an organic form with a motif of streamlining which
was to become so important in Western industrial design.
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