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by Dan Burnstein, Staff Writer
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History
The key to the expressionist style is the expression of emotion.
The Impressionists provided the push that cast painting off from its long history of smooth representations of reality. Their loose brushwork, Gauguin's "primitive" style and Cezanne's experimentation with perspective opened the door for Expressionism.
Dutchman Vincent van Gogh used energetic brushstrokes and vivid colors to impart emotional impact to his paintings. Norwegian Edvard Munch used flowing lines to depict anguish and love, while Austrians Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele handled eroticism and death. Influences from outside the arts include Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and the calamity of the two World Wars.
Experimentation with the expressionist style was perhaps most important in Germany. Though Hitler would attempt to squelch what he called "Degenerate Art," the style would spread throughout the world, and Expressionists like Wassily Kandinsky would pave the way for pure abstraction.
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Subject
Landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and various other subjects appear in expressionist works of art. Expressionist art is dynamic and psychological. The artist shows us his or her subjective, emotional reaction to objects and places by exaggerating colors, shapes, and movement. Figures can be pathetic, ugly, or hostile, in defiance of classical beauty and even natural appearance.
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Common Motifs
The human figure is ideally suited to the expressionist picture because of the range of emotion that a person is capable of exhibiting. The figure in this picture has a look of total serenity on his or her face, and the body
language implies that he or she has been lifted into a higher spiritual realm in the presence of the sacred bulls.
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Composition
Due in part to the importance of the graphic arts to expressionism, strong lines and bold, black outlines are often featured. These lines serve to draw the eyes of the viewer from place to place in a picture, increasing the dynamic effects of figures and objects depicted. In this picture, the outlines of the animal and human figures are more sofly delineated than in many expressionist images, since she relies more on the symbolism of color and content than on the forms themselves to express herself.
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Color
In this painting, the colors red and yellow dominate the picture. Each color is applied to a character in a way that clearly is not reality; the human figure assuming an intense yellow and the bulls being painted in varying
shades of red and orange. The colors enable the artist to create her own personal symbolism in the painting. As the bulls surround the figure, he or she stands out clearly and strongly in the picture plane, and refuses to be overwhelmed by the red of the bulls. Color taking on a symbolic meaning is common in expressionist painting. Paul Gauguin embraced this storytelling technique in the late 19th century.
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Brushstrokes
In an attempt to transmit to canvas a figure's heightened state of emotional response, the artist's brushstrokes often seem to tell the viewer that the same state is true of the artist. Strong, large swaths of aggressively laid
paint seem to indicate an act of frenzy, where basic components of the composition are emphasized in big lines and layers of color. In Isham's painting, this is accomplished via strong shapes (like the powerful animals and their horns)
executed in large areas of intense, complimentary color next to each other, rather than slashes competing against one another on the canvas. Isham's expressionist tool lies in the red and yellow juxtaposing planes, each
bringing out the other's meaning.
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See more expressionist art on PaintingsDIRECT.
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