Rise of Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement in which artists distorted shapes and used intense colours to convey inner feelings and not the outward appearance of things. It flourished mainly in Germany, where the group Die Brucke formed in Dresden in 1905 with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and the Blaue Reiter group, founded in Munich in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, took it toward abstraction. Edvard Munch's The Scream was an important precursor. The style spread to poetry, theatre, music and cinema, with films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920. It was shaped by anxiety about urban life and the First World War, and the Nazis later condemned many Expressionist works as degenerate art.

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