Collection: German Expressionism Follow artist

Emerging and evolving throughout the early 1900s right up to the interwar period and Hitler’s eventual ascent to power, German Expressionism was born on a wave of resistance and reaction.

Its members renounced the traditional values held in art institutions and society at large, and sought to establish an avant-garde movement that would cut a swathe through those elements of contemporary culture they saw as most destructive and damaging: the rise of the urban landscape and its mechanised industrialisation; the austerity and prudishness of state-sponsored art and religion; and, above all, the predominance of conventional representation in art and the ideology of realism.