A seated woman in an interior setting is a common scene featured in artworks stretching across styles and mediums.
Fauvism + Expressionism
"He has clarity in his humanness, in his present-ness: ‘I'm here, right now, and not for long.’"
Wangechi Mutu on Egon Schiele
Modersohn-Becker almost single-handedly invented a new genre in European modern art: the nude, female self-portrait.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait Nude with Amber Necklace, ...
The German Expressionist Emil Nolde was particularly explicit in linking himself to a Nordic tradition.
Expressionism as Nordic?
The Fauves created paintings that seem to celebrate the pleasures of painting as much as the pleasures of life.
Fauve Landscapes and City Views
Derain used a liberated Fauve approach to color and form to depict female figures in an exotic setting.
André Derain, The Dance
Marc looked all the way back to a state of nature before humankind even existed.
Franz Marc and the animalization of art
Kandinsky believed that humankind was on the verge of a cataclysmic change from the current, materialistic epoch to an “Epoch of the Great Spiritual.”
Kandinsky, Apocalypse, Abstraction
The figure of the Blue Rider thus embodied the spiritual focus of the group as well as their belief that art plays an important social role in the struggle between good and evil.
Der Blaue Reiter
This portrait is one of thousands stolen by the Nazis, and its story shows that the madness didn’t end with WWII.
Nazi looting: Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally
Not a term chosen by the artists, it describes art that emphasized the emotional impact over descriptive accuracy.
Expressionism, an introduction
Kandinsky’s work of “total art” combines both abstract and representational images with rhythmic, mystical poetry.
Vasily Kandinsky, Klänge (Sounds)
In a series of multicolored prints, Nolde captured the awkward experience of watching a couple fight in public.
Emil Nolde, Young Couple
Kirchner’s claustrophobic city scene reflects on a culture where everything is for sale.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin
At first glance this looks like a series of cheerful circus images, but upon further inspection, it’s much darker.
Henri Matisse, the illustrated book Jazz
When Matisse painted this, all the cool kids were into cubist geometry—and Matisse was definitely cool.
Henri Matisse, The Blue Window
The body’s expressive contortions reflect sculptural tradition, but Schiele used it to express the interior self.
Egon Schiele, Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait)
Is Schiele’s haunted figure meant to be a famed Austrian artist or Jesus Christ—or both?
Egon Schiele, The Hermits
Jawlensky rejected the principles of his arts education in order to embrace Expressionism at its most extreme.
Alexej von Jawlensky, Young Girl in a ...
Matisse borrows brushwork technique from his pal Signac—but don’t call him a Pointillist just yet.
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