The very elastic concept of Expressionism refers to art that emphasizes the extreme expressive properties of pictorial form in order to explore subjective emotions and inner psychological truths. Although much influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch, the artists who pioneered Expressionism departed even further from traditional notions of recording the appearance of reality than had the Post-Impressionists or the Symbolists. They were also influenced by Henri Matisse and the other Fauves, the Cubists, African and Oceanic art, and the folk art of Germany and Russia. In conjunction with poets, dramatists, and other writers, they championed idealist values and freedom from the constricting forces and repressive materialism of bourgeois society. One prominent Expressionist group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), which was active as a group from 1905 to 1913, included founders Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff as well as Otto Müller, Emil Nolde (for a brief period), and Max Pechstein. Members of Die Brücke conveyed pictorially the Modernist themes of alienation, anxiety, and social fragmentation. They employed emotion-charged images, a “primitive” simplification of form, a deliberate crudeness of figuration, agitated brushwork, and powerful, often violent juxtapositions of intense color.
Artists involved in the more stylistically diverse Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded in 1911 in Munich by Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Gabriele Münter, sought to convey spiritual states through the abstraction of forms. Alexej Jawlensky and August Macke were associated with the group, and many others participated in the Blue Rider exhibitions. Other important Expressionists in Germany were Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker, and in Austria Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.