EXPRESSIONISM

EXPRESSIONISM

[For students of Indian Universities]

Dr. S. Sreekumar

1. INTRODUCTION

Expressionism is a movement in art that originated in Germany and remained popular from 1910 to 1924. The movement began to decline by 1925 and the Nazis whose influence was growing at that time suppressed the movement for political reasons.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Expressionism as a style of painting, music, drama etc., in which an artist or writer seeks to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world”. However this definition does not tell us much about the various facts of the movement and “expressionism itself was never a concerted or well-defined movement” (Abrams).

REALISM

REALISM

From the study material for different universities prepared by Dr. S. Sreekumar

1. What is Realism?

Damian Grant begins his monograph on realism thus:

Nothing illustrates the chronic instability of the word more clearly than its uncontrollable tendency to attract another qualifying word, or words, to provide some kind of semantic support.

Here, Grant is pointing out two important aspects of realism. Firstly, the word suffers from a ‘chronic instability’. Secondly, the word needs some other ‘semantic support’ to survive. Grant adds that these two qualities of the term have given rise to numerous types of ‘realisms’ and he lists out as many as twenty six different types.