INART 55

History of Electroacoustic Music

Expressionism


Edvard Munch
The Scream (1893)
a precursor to Expressionist painting

Oscar Kokoschka
Pieta
(1908)

Oscar Kokoschka
Knight Errant
(1915)

Egon Schiele
Mother with Two Children
(1917)

Image from the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920, directed by Robert Wiene,
screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer
Expressionism was a movement in painting and literature that sought to look beneath the surface to the inner life of its subjects. Expressionism is an artistic outgrowth of Freud's writing. A work of art was meant to be the same as a dream, symbolic of an internal truth.

Many expressionist artists allied themselves with the atonal composers.