Expressionism is a modernist movement that emerged in the early 20th century, primarily in Germany. Rather than depicting objective physical reality, Expressionist artists sought to convey subjective emotions and inner psychological states. The style is defined by its radical distortion of form and use of intense, non-naturalistic color to evoke powerful moods and ideas. It presents the world from a deeply personal perspective, prioritizing emotional truth over visual accuracy.

The movement developed as a response to the widespread anxiety, industrialization, and spiritual displacement felt in Germany during the years leading up to World War I. It was not a single, unified style but rather an artistic attitude that found form in two key groups. The first, Die Brücke (The Bridge), was established in Dresden in 1905 by artists including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel. They used jarring colors, agitated brushwork, and distorted figures to explore themes of urban alienation, sexuality, and raw human emotion, heavily reviving the woodcut as a medium for its direct and crude expressive power.

The second major group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), was formed in Munich in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This circle was less concerned with social critique and more focused on expressing spiritual truths and the inner life through art. They used symbolic color and took significant steps towards complete abstraction, believing art could provide the spiritual renewal that modern society lacked. The movement drew significant inspiration from Post-Impressionist artists like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, as well as the psychologically charged work of the Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch. Although the classical period of German Expressionism waned by the 1920s, giving way to the New Objectivity movement, its principles had a profound and lasting impact on art, theatre, and film, and its legacy can be traced through later movements like Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism.

The style originated principally in Germany and Austria. There were a number of groups of expressionist painters, including Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke.

Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,  particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.

The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a historical sense, much older painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual and subjective perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.

Among the poets associated with German Expressionism were:

German expressionism was an early twentieth century German art 
movement that emphasized the artist's inner feelings or ideas over 
replicating reality, and was characterised by simplified shapes, bright 
colours and gestural marks or brushstrokes. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

It was prevalent in cinema as well as art, when Germany lost World War I and the German film industry was facing an overhaul.