expression theory of art essay

The Expression Theory of Art: A Critical Evaluation Essay (Critical Writing)

Art has been part of mankind for thousands of years. Scholars have come up with different theories of art; one among them is the expression theory. The theory was developed during the Romantic Movement, which reacted against C18th classicism and placing the artist at the focal point of his or her work. Accordingly, art work is believed to portray the exceptional, individual stance and sentiments of the artist; consequently for art to be considered good, it must clearly show the sentiments and feelings the individual intends to express (Freeland, 2001). However, Freeland openly disagrees with this theory of art, but favors a cognitive theory. Since the writer holds the expression theory of art, the paper will respond to Freeland’s criticism.

It is important to mention that Freeland was in favor of cognitive theory which holds that art is closely related to language since it is an avenue through which artists try to air or share complex ideas and thoughts. According to the scholar, adopting the expression theory is not adequate in explaining art work. Freeland, (2001) asserts that the theory is thus limiting since it only allows artists to express their feelings and emotions.

Although she is right that art work does not only express feelings and emotions but also ideas, I tend to strongly believe that the concept of the ideas to be presented is a by-product of the artists’ emotions or feeling, for instance, paintings from Mali showing people under a pool of blood. It is my view that the work was done by the artist to express his feelings and emotions based on the killings in the country hence presenting the idea that war is actually a bad thing.

There are also, some instances where art work does not necessarily express ideas. For instance, music has been found not to express ideas but feelings and emotions of the artist (Freeland, 2001). Additionally borrowing from the suggestions of Ayn Rand, it is worth noting that the primary objective of art work is not to communicate but to objectify certain values such as culture among others.

Ideally, the importance of art work can only be measured by the impact it has to the society. This is a view that is also held by Freeland. According to the expression theory of art, the best way to impact on a given population or group of people is by capturing their attention. There is no better way in my opinion other than using the emotions and feelings of the artists. When artists creatively express their feelings and emotions, the audiences are likely to be affected or impacted by the same sentiments (Freeland, 2001).

It also seems that cognitive theory of art fronted by Freeland tends to present artists and their work as two distinct entities where the artists’ characteristics, experiences as well as emotions do not have a direct impact on their work. This is not right in my opinion since; the products of art are largely influenced by the past and present experiences of the artists. It is through such experiences that ideas are presented through art work (Freeland, 2001). Last but not least, the theory is indeed suitable in interpreting art since it is in correspondence to intuition of different contemporary artists. For instance the terrible passion of humanity has been expressed clearly by red and green.

From the review of the expression theory of art work, it is evident that despite the fact that it has been criticized by scholars such as Freeland, it still has a number of strength making it a suitable approach to defining and interpreting art work.

Freeland, C. (2001). But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory . Oxford University: Oxford University Press.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Abstract expressionism.

Number 28, 1950

Jackson Pollock

The Glazier

Willem de Kooning

No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow)

Mark Rothko

The Flesh Eaters

William Baziotes

Black Reflections

Franz Kline

Clyfford Still

Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental

Richard Pousette-Dart

David Smith

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70

Robert Motherwell

Black Untitled

Barnett Newman

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Night Creatures

Lee Krasner

Stella Paul Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world’s focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as “Abstract Expressionists” or “The New York School” did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.

Context Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists’ desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.

But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse , Léger , and Picasso , among others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced art was Albert Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University from 1927 to 1943. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching. The German expatriate Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) became the most influential teacher of modern art in the United States, and his impact reached both artists and critics.

The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man’s dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

Early Work Early on, the Abstract Expressionists, in seeking a timeless and powerful subject matter, turned to primitive myth and archaic art for inspiration. Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Newman, and Baziotes all looked to ancient or primitive cultures for expression. Their early works feature pictographic and biomorphic elements transformed into personal code. Jungian psychology was compelling, too, in its assertion of the collective unconscious. Directness of expression was paramount, best achieved through lack of premeditation. In a famous letter to the New York Times (June 1943), Gottlieb and Rothko, with the assistance of Newman, wrote: “To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical.”

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Gesture In 1947, Pollock developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers. De Kooning, too, was developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and powerful iconic figurative images. Other colleagues, including Krasner and Kline, were equally engaged in creating an art of dynamic gesture in which every inch of a picture is fully charged. For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. A painting is meant to be a revelation of the artist’s authentic identity. The gesture, the artist’s “signature,” is evidence of the actual process of the work’s creation. It is in reference to this aspect of the work that critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Another path lay in the expressive potential of color. Rothko, Newman, and Still, for instance, created art based on simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields. The impulse was, in general, reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified in order to create a kind of elemental impact. Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of a goal to achieve the “sublime” rather than the “beautiful,” harkening back to Edmund Burke in a drive for the grand, heroic vision in opposition to a calming or comforting effect. Newman described his reductivism as one means of “freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend … freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting.” For Rothko, his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color should provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale. And they were meant to be seen in relatively close environments, so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work. Rothko said, “I paint big to be intimate.” The notion is toward the personal (authentic expression of the individual) rather than the grandiose.

The Aftermath The first generation of Abstract Expressionism flourished between 1943 and the mid-1950s. The movement effectively shifted the art world’s focus from Europe (specifically Paris) to New York in the postwar years. The paintings were seen widely in traveling exhibitions and through publications. In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, new generations of artists—both American and European—were profoundly marked by the breakthroughs made by the first generation, and went on to create their own important expressions based on, but not imitative of, those who forged the way.

Paul, Stella. “Abstract Expressionism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Stella Paul

Paul, Stella. “ Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold .” (October 2004)

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1.3: What is the Connection between Artworks and Emotions?

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Pierre Fasula

There are many connections between artworks and emotions, and this chapter aims at describing the ones that are philosophically significant. For this reason, it will focus on the Expression Theory of Art and its main alternatives.

We can describe artworks as sad or cheerful for instance, and more generally as expressing emotions such as enthusiasm, admiration, and desperation. To take famous examples, Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream expresses anxiety; Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Infanta the sadness of mourning; George Miller’s movie Mad Max the rage in front of the loss of kinship. But how are we supposed to understand and explain this connection between artworks and emotions in terms of expression? And is expression the only relation between artworks and emotions? In this chapter, we will explore three main alternatives: the first section develops the idea that artworks express the artist’s emotions; the second that art elicits and represents emotions independently of the artist’s emotions; and the third that art can be said to express emotions by themselves.

Let’s present these alternatives more closely. The first one is generally termed the Expression Theory of Art: if artworks can be described with the vocabulary of emotions, as expressing emotions, it is because they express the artist’s emotions. An additional feature is that this expression of the artist enables the audience to experience these emotions. But it seems necessary to assess such a theory: is it legitimate to explain the sadness of a poem by saying that it actually expresses the sadness of its creator? The second theory involves no reference to the artist’s emotions. A more central relation lies between the artwork and the audience, as the former is made to elicit emotions in the latter or represent emotions for the latter. However, what is the difference between elicitation and representation? And what is the connection between representing and expressing emotions? The third alternative defends precisely the idea that artworks can be said to express emotions themselves, without being necessarily connected to the artist’s emotions or those of the audience.

A historical remark must first be made in order to bring out the specificity of this issue. That artworks express the artist’s emotions is an idea that appears with romanticism, at the beginning of the 19 th century. [1] Before this period, another conception of artworks is predominant: they were considered as representations of reality. [2] This concept of representation can be understood in many ways and raises issues, but the most important for this chapter is that this concept of representation was more or less supplanted by the concept of expression, as can be seen for instance in the famous claim of the English romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in his preface to Lyrical Ballads : “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth and Coleridge [1800] 1991, 237). Even if, according to Wordsworth, “our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts” (237) and his aim was to describe and colour ordinary life, the expression of emotions became central, a criterion not only for judging but also defining poetry, and later any kind of art.

The Expression Theory of Art

In this section, we will begin with a description of the Expression Theory of Art, following the path of two famous defenders of it: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) in What is Art? and R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943) in The Principles of Art. Then we’ll consider several criticisms that can be addressed to this theory.

Suppose you find and describe such or such poem as expressing anger; it is rather natural to try to explain it by saying that the poem expresses the artist’s anger. More precisely, the mention of the artist’s anger functions here both as a justification of our description, and as an explanation of the poem itself, in the sense that the poet is supposed to have experienced such a feeling and produced the poem according to his feeling. However, it is possible to refine this ordinary explanation using literary and philosophical resources.

Tolstoy presents the Expression Theory of Art in the 5 th chapter of What Is Art? Its first four chapters are devoted to beauty, insofar as beauty is very often considered as a criterion to distinguish between art and non-art. Tolstoy criticises such a use of the idea of beauty in order to propose another measure: the expression of emotions. The idea of beauty is particularly contentious, and as such it can’t provide a definition of art. This is why Tolstoy considers another option, shifting art into a more general framework: “the conditions of human life” (Tolstoy 1904, 47). Art is supposed to be one of these conditions of human life, or more precisely, “one of the means of intercourse between man and man” (47). Tolstoy then defines art in this way:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them. (Tolstoy 1904, 50)

This definition implies, firstly, the presence of an artist, an audience, and an emotion; secondly, that the transfer of emotion from the artist to the audience is intentional (“consciously”); thirdly, that this requires an inward evocation and a clarification of what is experienced; fourthly, that the expression is based on specific artistic media (movements, lines, colours, sounds, words).

Thus Tolstoy puts together the elements of a dynamic model of art, emphasizing agents, action, and the means entailed in the experience and practice of art. Such a model is for Tolstoy more appropriate than the criterion of beauty insofar as it grasps the nature of art via its practice.

Collingwood similarly highlights these aspects of art, using the concept of expression to define art in his own version of the Expression Theory. However, his relevance and added value in comparison with Tolstoy lies in the distinction he draws between bringing out emotions and artistic expression:

When a man is said to express emotion, what is being said about him comes to this. At first, he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel … I don’t know what I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It has also something to do with consciousness: the emotion expressed is an emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious. It also has something to do with the way in which he feels the emotion. As unexpressed, he feels it in what we called a helpless and oppressed way; as expressed, he feels in a way from which this sense of oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightened and eased. (Collingwood 1960, 109–10)

At the beginning of the process of creation, there isn’t an identified “ready-made” emotion waiting for its expression, but what Collingwood calls a perturbation, an excitement; that is to say, an internal feeling, the nature and the cause of which are still undetermined. An activity, the expression of oneself (the paradigm of which is language) clarifies, makes the perturbation conscious, and transforms it into an emotion, while alleviating the individual’s perturbation. Thus, Collingwood considers the expression of the emotions in a deeper and a more subtle way, describing more precisely its actions and effects in individuals, but leaving aside other dimensions taken into account by Tolstoy, such as the necessity of an audience and the means of artistic expression. This provides the starting point of the next section.

The audience, the identity, and the existence of emotions in artistic creation

The expression theory of art by both Tolstoy and Collingwood are questionable, and we’ll raise objections corresponding to their main elements.

The first objection deals with the necessity of an audience to which to communicate the emotions. An interesting feature of Collingwood’s (1960) version of this theory is that “the expression of an emotion by speech may be addressed to someone; but if so it is not done with the intention of arousing a like emotion in him” (110, italics mine). This introduces a difference with Tolstoy’s version. According to the latter, art consists, as an activity, in passing on emotions to other people; whereas, according to the former, the relation of art to an audience is only a possibility, not a necessity. The consequence is that there are actually two versions of Expression Theory of art, named by Noël Carroll in Philosophy of Art respectively the “transmission theory” and the “solo theory” (Carroll 1999, 65).

What is the issue? The objection to the transmission theory is that “one can make a work of art for oneself” without trying to publish it (e.g., literature) or to exhibit it (e.g., painting, sculpture) (Carroll 1999, 67). Someone else who would read or see it would deem it as an artwork, but if the artist hides it, the work is still an artwork. The rejoinder is that the mere fact of writing a poem, or producing a painting, or creating a piece of music, is a use of public media that makes the emotions public, which “indicate[s] an intention to communicate to others” (67).

A solution can be developed from two similar remarks. Firstly, there is a distinction between an actual and a potential audience. An artist may not want to address such or such audience, but create an artwork designed to communicate to a potential audience. Secondly, one can question the intention to communicate to others, without questioning the communication itself. Even if it is not the intention of an artist to communicate emotions to others, an artwork can nevertheless communicate emotions. These two remarks converge in the idea that communication is a potentiality, not necessarily an intention nor even a fact. This potentiality is actualised if the artwork is presented to a public. This idea preserves both the idea that one can make a work of art for oneself, and that the medium used is publicly accessible.

There is a second objection one can make against the transmission version. It deals with the identity of the emotion supposed to be communicated from the artist to the audience. “Identity” means firstly that the audience experiences the same emotion as the artist, which implies that the artist experienced this emotion and transmits it. But is this necessarily the case? A poet can express a feeling of sorrow, but the audience feels admiration for this expression. Let’s take for instance Victor Hugo’s poem “Tomorrow, At Dawn” (1856), related to the death of his daughter:

At dawn tomorrow, when the plains grow bright, I’ll go. You wait for me: I know you do. I’ll cross the woods, I’ll cross the mountain-height. No longer can I keep away from you. I’ll walk along with eyes fixed on my mind— The world around I’ll neither hear nor see— Alone, unknown, hands crossed, and back inclined; And day and night will be alike to me. I’ll see neither the gold of evening gloom Nor the sails off to Harfleur far away; And when I come, I’ll place upon your tomb Some flowering heather and a holly spray. (Hugo 2004, 199)

The emotion expressed and the emotion experienced may not be the same: Hugo expresses sadness, annihilation, and isolation, whereas the audience may well feel sadness, but also compassion, and perhaps more generally admiration, in response to such an expression of love.

“Identity” also refers to the identification of the emotions. Is the audience supposed to experience “these” emotions, as if it were possible to clearly identify our emotions? One can highlight the generality and vagueness of certain emotions. They are not necessarily individualised, but general, shared, and they are not necessarily clearly defined, but vague. In the example above, emotions overlap, and some of them are explicitly mentioned, others only suggested. It is true that this could be precisely the function of artworks to individualise and define our emotions. But such an idea fits only with a part of artistic practice: e.g., poetry is only sometimes an evocation of entangled emotions.

Ultimately, the Expression Theory of Art assumes the artist’s experience of emotions. However it is not at all certain that she must experience this emotion herself. Does a writer of a thriller experience fear, so that the thriller expresses and produces fear in the audience? It is likely they experience excitement in trying to produce fear. This objection does not deal anymore with the identity of the emotion, but with its very existence, at the roots of the potential relation between the artist and the audience. Why should an artist even experience any emotion? Of course, it would be difficult to defend the idea of artists experiencing no emotion at all. But it does not mean that emotions are the cause, the reason, or the object of creation. In this sense, emotions are not always necessary to creation.

Eliciting and Representing Emotions

These criticisms do not imply the rejection of expression of/and emotions in art, but only of the idea that art must be defined as an expression of the artist’s emotions to an audience by certain means. Moreover, such a criticism allows other possible descriptions of the relation between artworks and emotions, such as elicitation and representation, which we consider in this section.

It is a classical idea of the rhetorical approach to literary works that they elicit emotions. Rhetoric describes the techniques by which one is able to produce reactions in an audience according to context. In the judicial field, the lawyer has to convince judges regarding past facts in order to win the case. In the political field, politicians and ordinary citizens have to convince each other to make a decision about the future, according to what is useful or detrimental to the country. In the field of public eulogies, the speaker has to praise or comfort. In all these cases, the rhetoric provides non-linguistic means such as advice about posture, gestures, etc., and linguistic means such as patterns of arguments (for instance, enthymemes) and figures of speech, that both play on and elicit emotional reactions, in order to convince and persuade.

Beyond these specific fields, literary criticism and more generally aesthetics use (among other things) the figures of speech studied and systematised by rhetoric. They do so in order not only to describe literary artworks and the style of artworks, but also to show the way artists and literary writers use these figures of speech as means to elicit emotions. Let’s consider the first stanza of Rimbaud’s “Orphans’ New Year Gifts” (1870):

The room is full of shadow and the sad Faint whispering of two little ones, Heads still heavy with dreams Beneath the long white curtain, stirring slightly … Outside, birds cluster for warmth, Wings drooping against the grey sky. And the New Year, dragging mist, Trailing its snow-dress on the ground, Smiles through tears, and shivers a song … (Rimbaud 2001, 3)

A significant feature is its general structure, organised around the contrast of two locations, a room and the outside, but also the continuity established between them by the echo of the shadow of the room in the sad whispering of the orphans, on one hand, and the mist of the New year and its “smile through tears,” on the other. But more important is the personification of the New Year, which drags mist, trails a snow-dress, smiles through tears, and shivers a song, as a presence outside that echoes the orphans’ sadness within. This figure of speech contributes to the eliciting of visual and emotional impressions, as a picture materialises gradually and a feeling of sadness arises, one that then envelops the whole stanza.

An alternative way to describe this elicitation of emotions can be found in T.S. Eliot’s essay on “Hamlet and His Problems,” under the label of “objective correlative.” There he tries to explain what is, according to him, Hamlet ’s failure. A starting point is his agreement with the idea that “the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son [Hamlet] towards a guilty mother” (Eliot 1939, 144). If there is a failure, though, it lies in that “Hamlet is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, . . . that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem” (145). By contrast, here is the rule T.S. Eliot defends:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot 1939, 145)

The emotion of the play and, more generally, of a literary work is to be found in an objective correlative, which is an “exact equivalent” characterised by a “complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.” That’s to say, more concretely, the emotion is found in a description of situations, events, characters, reactions, that shows this emotion, and therefore in a full representation of the emotion that elicits it in the audience. According to T.S. Eliot one finds a good example of objective correlative in Macbeth :

You will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last events in the series. (Eliot 1939, 145)

Nevertheless, it would be superficial to present the elicitation of emotions as a causal production of emotion by means of figures of speech. As Danto puts it in his discussion of Aristotle and rhetoric in the last part of The Transfiguration of the Common place ,

if it be anger they [rhetoricians] intend to arouse, they will know how to characterize the intended object of the anger in such a way that anger toward that object is the only justifiable response. . . . After all, like beliefs and actions–in contrast with bare perceptions and mere bodily movements–emotions–in contrast perhaps with bare feelings–are embedded in structures of justification. There are things we know we ought to feel given a certain characterization of the conditions we are under. (Danto 1981, 169)

To elicit emotions for a (literary) artwork is not merely a matter of causal relation: the artwork, its figures of speech, or its style, if successful, are such that one should have a determinate emotional response. In other words, not any emotion is admissible but only some of them are justifiable in front of a particular artwork.

To conclude this section, it is possible to argue that, even though artworks do not necessarily express the artist’s emotions, they elicit emotions in the audience by artistic means such as figures of speech in literary artworks, or representation of emotions in the choice of a certain “correlated” objectivity, such as a series of actions in a play or a set of forms and colours in a painting.

An Autonomous Expression

The idea defended in the last section, according to which artworks can represent emotions, allows us to come back to the notion of expression, but in a different way to the Expression Theory of Art elaborated in the first section. T.S. Eliot uses “representation” and “expression” almost indistinguishably, but these terms should be refined. What does it mean for artworks not only to represent but also to express emotions by themselves? A closer analysis of the notion of expression is needed here.

In our ordinary judgments, we talk about the sadness of a poem, the fact that a certain piece of music is described as joyful and another one as desperate, or that a particular style for a building is cold. Hence, the question: Can artworks be said to express emotions themselves? And why would it be a problem? As Oets K. Bouwsma explains in “The Expression Theory of Art,”

The use of emotional terms—sad, gay, joyous, calm, restless, hopeful, playful, etc.—in describing music, poems, pictures, etc., is indeed common. So long as such descriptions are accepted and understood in innocence, there will be, of course, no puzzle. But nearly everyone can understand the motives of [the] question “How can music be sad?” and of his impulsive “It can’t, of course.” (Bouswma 1959, 74)

How can we explain such a paradoxical use of emotional terms, which seems to be at the same time accepted and impossible? What is assumed in “Music can’t be sad” is “… as someone can be sad.” It is the reason why, according to Bouswma, it is interesting to consider and compare several uses of “sad,” such as: “Cassie is sad,” “Cassie’s dog is sad,” “Cassie’s book is sad,” and “Cassie’s face is sad.” In the first case, one can imagine Cassie learning the death of a next of kin and crying, or reading a wonderful but sad poem, and becoming sad herself, crying or not. In the second case, it makes sense to say that the dog can be sad, but could it cry? One does not expect the dog to express sadness in all the ways human beings do (a dog does not restrain its howls). One can paraphrase the third case saying that this book makes Cassie sad. And in the last case, one can easily describe obvious signs of sadness, however there is no guarantee that she is really sad.

What conclusion can we draw now as regards to the assertion “the music is sad”? This assertion is similar neither to Cassie being sad and crying because of a death in her family, nor to Cassie being sad but not crying, nor to her dog being sad but not crying: a song is neither crying nor holding back tears! It is much more similar to “the book is sad,” understood as producing sadness, but particularly as being sad in itself, as a face can be sad, be it a real face or a drawing: the book, the music, and the face express sadness themselves but in a specific way.

How can one account for this expression? Are these examples really on the same level? One can find an answer in Nelson Goodman’s theory of expression in Languages of Art , which is based on the concepts of exemplification and metaphor.

An expression can be considered as a kind of exemplification. Exemplification refers to a certain relation of something to some properties. For instance, a sample of fabric exemplifies cashmere, in that (1) it is made of cashmere and therefore possesses this property to be made of cashmere, (2) qua sample, it refers to this property. Indeed, something can refer to cashmere without possessing this property of being made of cashmere, as it is the case in a description of this fabric.

However, such a definition of exemplification is not enough to account for the description of an artwork as expressing such or such emotion. It is true that a sad poem possesses this property of being sad, and refers to sadness in general, but how could a sad poem be “made of sadness” or be described literally as sad? The poem is not described literally as sad but metaphorically; the possession of the property is not literal but metaphorical. [3] Therefore, a poem exemplifies sadness in that (1) it refers to sadness and (2) possesses sadness (3) metaphorically.

One could object that this idea of metaphorical possession is obscure, as if only literal possession were without difficulty (for instance, in “this stone is hard”). However, among the different ways of describing things, events, people, etc., it is possible to attribute properties in a metaphorical way (and then to see in this possession an exemplification of the property in question). One could reply that, because it is a metaphor, the sadness is not “really” in the poem. However, the fact is that such a metaphorical description is sometimes far more objectively true than a literal one. To describe someone as a “Don Quixote” or a “Don Giovanni” (which means that this person possesses metaphorically and exemplifies the properties of Don Quixote or Don Giovanni) does not necessarily raise a question, whereas to describe literally such or such entity as a virus or an organism raises sometimes real difficulties and disagreements between scientists. In this sense, that a song or a poem expresses such or such emotion can be perfectly objective.

To conclude, there is certainly something right in the ordinary claim that artworks express emotions. This means that the issue lies somewhere else, in the philosophical accounts of such a claim. While a number of accounts can be found in contemporary philosophy, not all of them are likely to make sense of the ordinary claim about artwork’s expression of emotions.

More precisely, all the elements mentioned by Tolstoy are interesting for those who are passionate about arts: the relation of an artist and audience, the sharing of emotions, and the means used to do this. They all belong to our experience and practice of art, and one virtue of Tolstoy’s analysis is precisely to consider artworks in this broader context: our practices and experiences. At the same time, it raises a philosophical issue about what is essential in this general description if one wants to understand artworks’ specific feature regarding emotions: expressivity.

This chapter aims at showing the intrinsic expressivity of artworks, in addition to their capacity to elicit and represent emotions, ultimately leaving aside the artist’s and audience’s experience of emotions. The idea is neither to deny the reality of such an experience, nor its importance for the artist and the audience, but to highlight how artworks’ expressivity can be found in themselves, because they are themselves describable as expressing such or such emotion. To go further in this direction, one could say that the key to expressivity can be found in the functioning of works of art, for instance, the way a painting describes a landscape, possesses such or such characteristics (colours or lines), and refers to sadness or joy. What it is (characteristics) and what it does (description and reference) are central to understand how an artwork finally expresses emotions. The next step would be to come back to our experience and practice: How do they shape our ability to grasp the emotions expressed in artworks? What is the role of experience and practice in the understanding of the artwork’s expressivity?

Bouswma, Oets K. 1959. “The Expression Theory of Art.” In Aesthetics and Language , edited by William Elton, 73–99. Oxford: Blackwell.

Carroll, Noël. 1999. Philosophy of Art . London and New York: Routledge.

Collingwood, Robin G. 1960. The Principles of Art . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Danto, Arthur. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commplace . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1939. Selected Essays . London: Faber and Faber Limited.

Hugo, Victor. 2004. Selected Poems of Victor Hugo . Translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art . Indianapolis: The Bobs-Merrill Company.

Rimbaud, Arthur. 2001. Collected Poems . Edited by Martin Sorrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tolstoy, Leo. 1904. What is Art? Translated by Aylmer Maude. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

Wordsworth, William and Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. [1800] 1991. Lyrical Ballads . Edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Particularly in Great Britain with William Wordsworth’s poetry, for instance his Lyrical Ballads (1798), or in Germany with Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, for instance “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1818). ↵
The main representative works of this tradition are Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics , even if the overlapping of their concept of imitation and the concept of representation is problematic. The question is indeed: Do artworks have to imitate reality? If so, what does "imitate" mean here? And what is the reality that would have to be imitated? ↵
Goodman (1968) draws a distinction between literal and metaphorical descriptions as follows. A description is literal when the words are used in their ordinary, routine way (e.g., to use “green” to describe the grass). But it becomes metaphorical when the words are applied to new things that first of all resist such a description and then accept it (e.g., to use a word of colour in order to describe a mood). ↵

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11 Expression in Art

Aaron Ridley is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southampton in England.

Published: 02 September 2009
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It is natural to assign a significant role to artists in artistic expression, and perhaps to do so by extrapolating from the role we assign to people when they express themselves in everyday, non-artistic contexts. When, for instance, we say of someone's face that it expresses pleasure, we ordinarily take it that the pleasure revealed there is the person's own pleasure, and that the expression on their face is to be explained by the pleasure that they feel. In ordinary, non-artistic cases, then, we take the expression to reveal the state of the person, and the state of the person to explain the expression. The temptation is to suppose that the same must be true of artistic expression. The temptation, that is, is to suppose that a work of art expressing anguish both reveals and is to be explained by the artist's own anguish. But things may not be as straightforward as that.

1. Introduction

That the expression of emotion is among the principal purposes or points of art is a thought with a pedigree stretching back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks. Nor, so stated, is it a thought that many have wanted to oppose. Even the staunchest cognitivist or moral improver has granted that expression is one of the points of at least some art, however much he or she may have wanted to insist on the pre-eminence of other points. Serious disagreement arises only when an attempt is made to say what is actually meant by ‘expression’.

For the purposes of this essay, I want to set up an Everyman figure. He believes what I imagine more or less anyone would believe upon thinking about artistic expression for the first or second time. His view is this. As far as the artist is concerned, expressive art arises because the artist feels something. Perhaps he feels it now, at the moment of creation; or perhaps he creates out of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, as Wordsworth put it; or perhaps he just feels an urge to give vent to something that he knows is ‘in there’ somewhere. Whichever of these it is, though, artistic expression expresses something about the way the artist feels. In expressing what he feels, the artist creates an object of a certain sort, a work of art—and this object shows in some way what that feeling is or was. It does this, perhaps, by describing the feeling; or perhaps it does it by evoking the occasion for the feeling—by being what T. S. Eliot called the ‘objective correlative’ of the feeling; or perhaps it does it by sharing some property or set of properties with the feeling. However it does it, though, the art object somehow indicates or exhibits what the artist felt. The object that the artist creates is then experienced by an audience. Often, the audience is moved or made to feel things by the object. Perhaps the audience's feelings are directed to the artist (in sympathy, say, or in admiration); or perhaps the audience feels what the artist felt—perhaps, in Leo Tolstoy's words, the audience is ‘infected’ by the artist's feeling; or perhaps the audience is stirred by the object into feelings entirely its own. Whichever way it is, the experience of an expressive work of art is standardly or frequently a moving one. Taken together, these thoughts capture Everyman's position, or proto-position, perfectly well: artistic expression involves an artist's feeling something, embodying it in his work, and often moving his audience as a result.

Everyman is entirely right, of course—even if his position as it stands is unacceptably vague. I'll try to suggest towards the end of this essay how his position should be taken. But first it will be useful to attribute to him a more problematic way of understanding his view, a way that has a good deal in common, to put it no higher, with at least one canonical position in the literature. Leo Tolstoy, in militantly Christian retirement from writing two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, defended the following claim in his short book, What Is Art?

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and… then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling so that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art… Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them… Art is [thus] a means of union among men joining them together in the same feelings … (Tolstoy 1996 : 51)

Tolstoy's statement here is flat and apparently unambiguous. The function of art is to transmit feelings from artist to audience; the role of the artwork is simply that of a conduit through which the artist's feelings, as it were, flow. Elsewhere in What Is Art? there are indications that Tolstoy might have had something rather subtler than this in mind, and there are passages in the book that barely make sense except on the assumption that he did have. But for present purposes these details can be put aside. Let us simply take it that Tolstoy did indeed mean what, in the quoted passage, he appears to say.

This way of understanding expression—call it the transmission model—is clearly consistent with Everyman's main intuitions. But he may find on reflection that it offends, or at least grates against, some of his other intuitions. As it stands, the transmission model construes the work of art as a mere vehicle for the feeling transmitted through it, as no more than a means to the end of getting the feeling from the artist to the audience. In principle, then, the work of art could be replaced by anything else that got the feeling through as effectively. If Edvard Munch had been a gifted chemist, for instance, he might, instead of painting The Scream , have concocted a drug which produced in those who took it feelings identical to the ones expressed in the picture: The Scream need never have been painted.

Everyman's intuitions should begin to rebel at this point, for several reasons. First, the present way of describing things leaves one with no reason at all to value The Scream for itself, as a painting. Second, it strikes one as odd to think that any other painting, let alone a drug, could possibly have made available the exact experience to be had from looking at The Scream . And third, when one looks at The Scream , the anguish one sees is the anguish of that face, of that figure, captured in just those lines and colours. To think of the anguish as being somehow detachable from what Munch painted would surely be to falsify at least one important aspect of the experience that his picture offers. In each of these respects, it seems, the transmission model construes the relation between the artwork and the feeling it expresses in far too extrinsic and contingent a manner, a thought sometimes put by saying that one cannot, in the end, understand or do justice to a work of art if one insists on treating it simply as an instrument of some kind—for instance, an instrument for conveying feelings from artist to audience.

The transmission model is to be resisted, then. But its shortcomings are instructive, and they tell us quite a lot about what an acceptable way of cashing out Everyman's intuitions would have to look like. Above all, they tell us that an acceptable account of artistic expression must relate the work of art to the feelings expressed in such a way as to make the work's role in expressing those feelings an essential rather than an incidental feature of the sort of communication between artist and audience that artistic expression consists in. In the next three sections I shall attempt to spell out that constraint by considering, first, the relation of artist to expressive artwork, second, the relation of audience to expressive artwork, and third and most briefly, the artwork itself.

Here is a commonly offered reason why the temptation should be resisted, stated by Peter Kivy in the context of musical expression:

many, and perhaps most, of our emotive descriptions of music are logically independent of the states of mind of the composers of that music, whereas whether my clenched fist is or is not an expression of anger is logically dependent upon whether or not I am angry. It is unthinkable that I should amend my characterization of the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony (K.550) as somber, brooding, and melancholy, if I were to discover evidence of Mozart's happiness… during its composition. But that [on the present hypothesis] is exactly what I would have to do, just as I must cease to characterize a clenched fist as an expression of anger if I discover that the fist clencher is not angry. This is a matter of logic. (Kivy 1980 : 14–15)

Kivy's point here (following Tormey 1971 : 39–62) is partly to distinguish between something's express ing an emotion and its being expressive of that emotion: in the former case, the expression stands to the state of the person whose expression it is in the kind of relation I sketched out above (it reveals it, and is explained by it), whereas in the second case it does not. In the second case, where something is expressive of an emotion (Kivy invites us to think of the sad face of a St Bernard dog), the characterization we offer is ‘logically independent’ of the state of mind of the person (or dog) whose expression it is. The fact that he would not withdraw his description of the opening bars of Mozart's 40th Symphony upon discovering that its composer was happy when he wrote it, any more than he would withdraw his description of the St Bernard's face as ‘sad’ upon finding that the dog was cheerful, is taken by Kivy to indicate that musical expression—and artistic expression more generally—must standardly be of this latter, ‘logically independent’, sort: that such expression is not, in other words, to be understood by simply extrapolating from ordinary, non-artistic cases of expression.

By itself, this argument is hard to assess, since it is unclear how strong the conclusion is meant to be. Specifically, it is unclear what Kivy's talk of logical independence is supposed to amount to. The argument can be read in either of two ways: a weaker, which claims only that artistic expression is sometimes ‘logically independent’ of the state of the artist, and a stronger, which claims that artistic expression is essentially , or in its paradigm cases, logically independent of the state of the artist. Let's take the weak reading first (perhaps encouraged by Kivy's remark that it is only ‘many, perhaps most’, cases that exhibit the logical independence that he has in mind).

Imagine someone who successfully feigns a sombre expression upon hearing of a not wholly unwelcome death. To say that his pretence is successful is to say, first, that his expression does not reveal what he feels, but suggests something else instead, and second, that his expression, although perhaps to be explained by what he feels (by his reluctance to appear callous, say), is not to be explained by his being in the sombre state that his expression indicates. Thus, while his face is certainly expressive of sombreness, it does not express any sombreness of his, since he feels none. Here one might say that his expression is ‘logically independent’ of his state of mind, and decline to withdraw one's characterization of his face as ‘sombre’ even once his pretence has been discovered. In saying this, however, one would certainly not be saying that sombre facial expressions are, in general, logically independent of the states of mind of their owners. For what makes pretence of this sort possible is the background of genuine instances of expression against which it takes place. It is only because genuinely sombre people genuinely do look sombre that a feigned sombre expression can be mistaken for one genuinely expressing sombreness. In the present case, then, we are dealing with a thoroughly parasitical, atypical instance—one that is atypical precisely in exhibiting a disjunction between facial expression and state of mind. So, whatever degree of logical independence this instance shows, it shows also a background of logical dependence that is both more extensive and logically prior: it shows, that is, that people's expressions are not typically or standardly independent of their states of mind. The question for Kivy is now this: why prefer to assimilate Mozart's G-minor Symphony to a dog than to a person? Why understand the sombre expression of the symphony as analogous to a ‘sad’ St Bernard's face rather than as analogous to the ‘sombre’ face of a person who feigns melancholy? Why not suppose, in other words, that the sombreness of the Mozart symphony as written by a happy Mozart points up and exploits a background of sombre music written by sombre composers in exactly the way that the sombre face of the feigner points up and exploits a background of sombre people looking sombre? Kivy offers no reason for his preference. He therefore gives no grounds to believe that musical or artistic expression is ‘logically independent’ of the states of mind of artists, except, perhaps, in atypical, parasitic cases. The weak reading, then, fails to yield a conclusion of any general significance at all; and it is certainly far too weak to establish the impossibility of understanding artistic expression by extrapolating from ordinary, non-artistic cases of expression.

Despite claiming that it is only ‘many, perhaps most’, cases that exhibit a ‘logical independence’ of expression from the artist, it is clear that Kivy really has in mind the stronger reading of his argument: in the remainder of his book he treats ‘logical independence’ as standard or paradigmatic. It is also clear that, to have a chance of going through, the stronger reading must somehow circumvent the difficulty posed by the expressive feigner. What the stronger reading needs to establish is this: that a happy Mozart could have written a sombre G-minor Symphony even if no sombre music had ever been written by a sombre composer. If this can be established, there will be no warrant for supposing, as one must suppose in the feigning case, that any apparent instance of ‘logical independence’ really trades for its point on a deeper and logically prior background of dependence. Kivy himself, as I have already said, gives us nothing to go on here. But the claim that there could be sombre art even if none had ever been created by a sombre artist does have a certain prima facie plausibility that any corresponding claim made of feigned facial expressions would, at least on the face of it, lack. It is worth asking why that might be.

The answer, I think, is this. A feigned facial expression of gloom depends upon a background of genuine facial expressions of gloom, where a ‘genuine’ expression is one that someone wears because he feels gloomy (his expression both reveals his gloom and is explained by it). That much is surely true. But it is easy to move from this thought to a second: that a feigned facial expression depends upon a background, not merely of genuine facial expressions, but of natural facial expressions—a slippage, if it is one, perhaps facilitated by the fact that the ‘artificial’ is opposed to both the ‘natural’ and the ‘genuine’. It is this second thought, which may or may not be true, that is responsible for making it seem as if artistic and everyday expression must be radically different in kind. For art—unlike a person's face, one might say, or its configurations—is artificial, heavily dependent upon convention, and so not, one might think, a ‘natural’ mode of expression at all. To the extent, then, that expressive feigning depends upon a background of expressive ‘naturalness’, feigned artistic expression, unlike feigned facial expression, would appear to be impossible; it would therefore also appear—unlike, say, the face of a St Bernard dog—to be of no use in an explanation of how an artist, feeling one thing, might create a work of art expressive of something else. Which seems to put us quite close to the claim made by the strong reading, that artistic expression is essentially, or in its paradigm cases, ‘logically independent’ of the feelings of artists, and so to the more general claim that artistic expression cannot be understood by extrapolating from ordinary, everyday cases of non-artistic expression.

None of this, in my view, is at all persuasive. If the move from the genuine to the natural is, as I suspect, unwarranted—if, that is, there is no reason to think that expressive feigning depends upon a background of, as it were, naturally genuine expression rather than (merely) genuine expression—then we are no closer than before to the conclusion required by the strong reading. But even if the move is warranted—and suppose for a moment that it is—it still could not secure the required conclusion without major additional argumentation. Two things would have to be shown: first, that every kind of ordinary, non-artistic expression that can be feigned is, in the relevant sense, natural; and, second, that no paradigm or standard case of artistic expression is natural in that sense. I strongly doubt that either, and still less both together, could be shown in a non-vacuous way. The first argument, for instance, would have to account for the fact that a good deal of ordinary, everyday—and eminently feignable—expression is linguistic, leaving it to the second argument, presumably, to explain why, if the conventions that define a spoken language are indeed, and despite appearances, ‘natural’ in the relevant sense, those governing artistic expression are not. Or, to put the point the other way round, if the second argument were to succeed in showing that artistic conventions are somehow conventional ‘all the way down’, the first argument would have to have shown that no feignable piece of everyday expression is conventional except within certain, permissibly natural, limits. It isn't hard to see how such arguments are bound to degenerate into circular, question-begging exercises in stipulation: the ordinary just is the natural; the artistic just is the conventional; and so on.

There is nothing in any of this, I suggest, to offer the smallest hope of rescue to the strong reading of Kivy's position. There is nothing, in other words, to encourage the thought that what a work of art expresses is, in the standard or paradigm case, ‘logically independent’ of the state of the artist. I have laboured this point for a number of reasons, but chief among them has been a concern to head off the idea that, because artistic expression is a special case of expression, it must be a very special case indeed, perhaps even sui generis . Nothing in the discussion so far suggests that that is true. And certainly, the mere fact that, as Kivy puts it, ‘It is unthinkable that I should amend my characterization of the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony… as somber… if I were to discover evidence of Mozart's happiness… during its composition’ has no such extravagant consequence. Nor, except for the purpose of defusing talk of logical independence, need that fact drive one to wonder whether Mozart might not have been feigning. For the truth is that there is a perfectly ordinary, everyday explanation for Kivy's (quite rightly) declining to withdraw his characterization: that the evidence of the symphony itself trumps whatever imaginary evidence Kivy thinks of himself as discovering—just as, for instance, the publicly manifest evidence of Hitler's megalomania would trump any imagined ‘discovery’ about his modest, self-effacing nature in private. And, just as no discovery about Hitler's private life would make one think that his megalomania was somehow ‘logically independent’ of him, so there is no sort of discovery about Mozart—and what could it be? a letter? a diary entry?—that would make plausible the radical splitting off of him from the expressive properties of his work. What Kivy has overlooked, in short, is the homely possibility that an artwork itself may be evidence—and perhaps the best sort of evidence there is—of what an artist really felt (or of what emotional/imaginative state he was in).

The reason that Kivy doesn't take up this possibility, I suspect, is not any deep desire to assimilate Mozart's symphony to a dog's face. It is, rather, a wariness about deflecting appreciative and critical attention away from the work of art, where it belongs, and on to the historical person of the artist. The worry, crudely, is that if one takes a work of art to express—to reveal and to be explained by—an artist's state of mind, then the question ‘What is expressed here?’ may look as if it has to be answered in the light of evidence about the artist's state of mind, which might have nothing whatever to do with the work of art that he has actually produced. And this worry is fuelled by some of the things that artists have said about what they do. Tolstoy, as we have seen, talks of art as a set of ‘external signs’ intended to convey to an audience feelings that the artist ‘has lived through’, so encouraging the thought that the question ‘What do these external signs stand for?’ is best settled by asking what feelings the artist has, as a matter of fact, lived through. And here is Wordsworth, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads : poetry, he says,

takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins…. (Wordsworth 1995 : 23)

And T. S. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet :

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot 1932 : 145)

If Wordsworth tempts one to ask not what a poem expresses, but what emotion existed ‘in the mind’ of the poet before composition of the poem began, then Eliot, in much the same way, tempts one to ask just what the ‘particular emotion’ was, for which the artist may or may not have succeeded in finding an ‘objective correlative’. Like Tolstoy, Wordsworth and Eliot are here deep inside transmission territory, and so are both in real danger of minimizing or misconstruing the role of the work of art in artistic expression.

To this extent, Kivy is right to be wary of the role assigned in expression to the artist. But what is needed to keep the artist in his place, as it were, is a good deal less than—indeed, just about the opposite of—a demonstration of the logical independence of what a work of art expresses from what an artist felt. What is needed, as we have seen, is simply a reminder of the ordinary, everyday fact that actions speak louder than words—that what one does, how one behaves, reveals how one feels in a way that nothing else can. From the fact that the making of a work of art is standardly a peculiarly rich, reflective and elaborate sort of action, therefore, one should conclude that, standardly, a work of art offers the best possible (‘logical’) evidence of an artist's state, and so that, standardly, what a work of art expresses reveals that state, and is to be explained by it. This conclusion places the following constraint on any attempt to cash out Everyman's intuitions in a plausible way: that the artist must be seen as present in his work, much as a person must be seen as present in his behaviour, rather than as separate from it, behind it, or, above all, as ‘logically independent’ of it.

3. Audiences

Everyman's proto-position envisages artistic expression as involving an audience's being moved in some way. There is at least one thing that he had better not mean by this. He had better not mean that a work of art expresses whatever it makes its audience feel. Many considerations point to this prohibition, but the following is the simplest and most direct: a work of art can make one feel X precisely because one recognizes that it expresses Y, where X and Y are different. Suppose I feel an odd sense of uplift upon looking at The Scream (things could be worse); nothing in this makes The Scream expressive of such uplift. No more than in an ordinary, everyday case of expression, then, is what is felt by a witness of an expression to be taken, automatically, as what is expressed. (Your expression of gladness might sadden me, after all.) If an audience's feelings are indeed involved in artistic expression, then their involvement is going to have to be accounted for in some more subtle way than this.

It is possible, of course, that the proper response to the role of audiences' feelings in artistic expression is one of scepticism. One might acknowledge that people are, as a matter of fact, frequently moved by the experience of expressive art, and yet still deny that this has any significance for an understanding of artistic expression. It may be, for instance, that what a person feels upon experiencing a particular work of art is determined in some way by the associations that that work has for him: so, for example, Beethoven's 6th Symphony makes someone feel vulnerable because it reminds him of his nanny, while Apocalypse Now makes him smirk because he remembers what went on in the back row when he first saw it. In cases such as this, it is clear that the person's responses, however significant they may be for him, are altogether extrinsic to any issues concerning the expressive characteristics of the works that occasion them, and so are irrelevant to any attempt to understand artistic expression.

The same may be true, if somewhat less obviously, in a different kind of example. It may be the case, as a number of people have argued (see e.g. Feagin 1996 ), that, unless one's experience of a given work of art is coloured and informed by one's emotional responses to it, one will not be in a position fully to understand it. So, for instance, it might plausibly be suggested that a person at a good performance of King Lear who was not appalled by Gloucester's blinding would have failed to appreciate the true character of the events portrayed. If this is right, it would suggest that a certain kind of emotional engagement may be essential to some kinds of aesthetic appreciation. But nothing in the example shows that such engagement or response need have any bearing on expression specifically. It may well be, in other words, that audiences are moved in a host of diverse and valuable ways by expressive works of art without that fact being such as to contribute to an understanding of artistic expression. To the extent that that is the case, Everyman's intuitions about audiences will have to be set aside.

How, then, might a place be secured in an account of expression for an audience's responses? The foregoing suggests this: what an audience feels will be relevant to an account of artistic expression, first, if what it feels is related in some intrinsic way to what a work of art expresses, and, second, if its feeling that way is essential to its grasping the feeling expressed by the work. The first requirement rules out the second and third of the cases just discussed. Not only are responses based on private association not intrinsically related to what works of art express, they are not intrinsically related to works of art in any way at all; while responses that help one to see what a work is about, although related in the right sort of way to the work of art, need not be related to it as an expressive object. The second requirement serves, among other things, to rule out the example discussed at the beginning of this section. My imagined response of uplift is certainly intrinsically related to The Scream 's expression of anguish: but I need not feel uplifted in order to grasp the anguish expressed there. But the second requirement is also meant to do more. It is meant to rule out the following kind of possibility.

Suppose that whenever I experience an expressive work of art I feel the feelings it expresses. I feel anguish whenever I look at The Scream , for example, and am seized by a sombre, brooding melancholy whenever I listen to the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony. I am, in fact, exactly the sort of person that Tolstoy has in mind: I am invariably ‘infected’ by the feelings that works of art express. There is no question here that my responses satisfy the first requirement. I feel what I feel because of the feelings expressed in the works. But nothing in the example as it stands suggests that this fact about me, however much it might make my aesthetic experiences interesting or intense, is integral to an analysis of artistic expression. There are two reasons for this. First, my response may be peculiar to me; it may, in the end, be no less idiosyncratic to respond in this way than to respond on the basis of private association. So no conclusions of a general sort about expression can be drawn from the fact that that is how my responses are. Second, there is no reason to think that someone who responded differently, or who did not respond by feeling at all, would be missing anything. Their experience of expressive art would not be the same as mine, but that shows nothing about their capacity to notice or appreciate the features of artworks to which I respond by feeling what they express. This example, therefore, fails to satisfy the second requirement set out above—that what an audience feels must be essential to its grasping what an artwork expresses.

The only way in which an audience's responses can possibly be integral to an analysis of artistic expression, therefore, is if at least some of those responses are integral to grasping at least some of what, or at least some aspects of what, works of art can express. This is effectively to envisage a corollary of the position outlined in the previous section: a kind of response that (i) reveals the expressive properties of a work for what they are, and (ii) is explained by the work's having those properties. The idea here is close to something John Dewey once said:

Bare recognition is satisfied when a proper tag or label is attached, ‘proper’ signifying one that serves a purpose outside the act of recognition—as a salesman identifies wares by a sample. It involves no stir of the organism, no inner commotion. But an act of perception proceeds by waves that extend serially throughout the entire organism. There is, therefore, no such thing in perception as seeing or hearing plus emotion. The perceived object or scene is emotionally pervaded throughout. (Dewey 1980 : 55–6)

To respond without feeling might be to ‘recognize’ certain of a work's expressive properties; but to grasp those properties in their full richness and particularity is to ‘perceive’ them. A position of this general sort has been gestured towards recently by a number of writers, most often perhaps in the context of musical expression. So, for instance, Malcolm Budd has suggested that an imaginative engagement with music can enable ‘the listener to experience imaginatively (or really) the inner nature of emotional states in a peculiarly vivid, satisfying and poignant form’ (Budd 1995 : 154); Jerrold Levinson has remarked that perceiving ‘emotion in music and experiencing emotion from music may not be as separable in principle as one might have liked. If this is so, the suggestion that in aesthetic appreciation of music we simply cognize emotional attributes without feeling anything corresponding to them may be conceptually problematic as well as empirically incredible’ (Levinson 1982 : 335); and Roger Scruton has pointed out that ‘there may be a sense of “what it is like”… When I see a gesture from the first person point of view then I do not only see it as an expression; I grasp the completeness of the state of mind that is intimated through it’ (Scruton 1983 : 96, 99) (see also Ridley 1995 : 120–45, and Walton 1997 : 57–82).

There is little consensus in the current literature about the significance, or even the possibility, of such responses. Many prefer to regard an audience's feeling as essentially independent of the feelings expressed by artworks, and so as incidental to any account of artistic expression. The discussion in the present section suggests that that position is considerably more plausible than its analogue concerning the feelings of artists. For what it's worth, though, I want to cleave to Everyman's position. Just as I may sometimes have to put myself in your shoes—try to feel the expression on your face from the inside, as it were—in order to grasp how things really are with you, so, it seems to me, I sometimes get the full expressive point of a work of art only by responding emotionally to it—by resonating with it, even. Again, then, I am inclined to think that extrapolation from ordinary, everyday cases of expression is the most promising way of attempting to understand artistic expression.

4. Artworks

I argued in the introductory section that an acceptable account of artistic expression must relate a work of art to the feelings expressed there in such a way as to make the work's role in expressing those feelings an essential rather than an incidental feature of the transaction between artist and audience. With respect to the artist, this comes to the thought that, in standard cases, the expressive properties of a work of art both reveal the artist's state and are to be explained by it. With respect to the audience the position is perhaps less clear, but I have suggested that, in certain cases at least, the expressive properties of a work of art are both revealed by, and explanatory of, the responses of an audience.

These considerations give us a good overall indication of what is required in order to make Everyman's position a plausible account of artistic expression. They also, of course, tell us the kinds of things that need to be said about artworks in such an account, namely, that artworks must be understood as objects having expressive properties capable of revealing and of being explained by the feelings of artists and (perhaps) of explaining and of being revealed by the feelings of audiences. Beyond that, however, there is very little of a general nature to be said. The various forms of art differ hugely from one another in the kinds of resources they make available for artistic manipulation, and so differ hugely from one another in the kinds of property that, in one context or another, can be expressive, and in what way. At this point, then, the attempt to arrive at a full understanding of artistic expression must devolve on to the theories of the individual arts, where, for instance, one might give an account of the expressive nature of dance by relating the gestures it contains to the gestures of human beings when they express their feelings; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of certain paintings by appealing to atmosphere or ambience—to features that have an expressive charge whether in or out of art; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of music by relating its movements to the movements of people in the grip of this or that feeling—for example rapid, violent music for frenzy or for rage; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of poetry by highlighting locutions or rhythms that are characteristic of ordinary, spoken expressions of feeling; and so on. The problems and possible solutions are quite distinct for each of the various arts, even if, with respect to each of them, one is essentially trying to answer the same questions: in virtue of what features is this artwork expressive? And: what is it that someone might attend to, recognize, or perceive in a work of this kind that would lead him to characterize it in expressive terms?

5. Expression Proper

So how, finally, might Everyman's proto-position be filled out so as to give a satisfactory—and suitably general—account of artistic expression? The answer, it seems to me, lies in R. G. Collingwood's treatment of the issue in his wonderful, though wonderfully uneven, book, The Principles of Art .

Collingwood's basic claim is that what is involved in artistic expression is nothing more than what is involved in ordinary, everyday instances of expression. Indeed, he goes so far at one point as to say that ‘Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art’ (1938: 285); and this, while surely overstating the case, is indicative of the seriousness with which he takes the continuity between the artistic and the non-artistic. For him, the purpose of expression—in or out of art—is self-knowledge. One finds out what one thinks or feels by giving expression to it. At the beginning of the process of expression, Collingwood holds, the artist knows almost nothing of what he feels:

all he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is ‘I feel… I don't know what I feel.’ From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. (Collingwood 1938 : 109)

The artist attempts to extricate himself from his ‘helpless and oppressed condition’, then, by trying to answer the question ‘What is it I feel?’ When he first asks this question, there is no answer to be given: his state is inchoate, and nothing specific can be said about it. If he is successful in his efforts, however, the question eventually receives its answer, and this is given in the expression that the artist produces. The feeling that the artist expresses, therefore, is both clarified and transformed in the process of being expressed, so that ‘Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is’ (Collingwood 1938 : 111); which is why ‘the expression of emotion is not [something] made to fit an emotion already existing, but is an activity without which the experience of emotion cannot exist’ (1938: 244). On this account, then, an emotion is not so much revealed for what it is by receiving expression: it becomes what it is by receiving expression.

The emotion becomes what it is through being given form, through being developed into something specific. In this way, the fully formed emotion and the expression it receives are indistinguishable from one another—indeed, they are one and the same: it is in virtue of having been given that form that the emotion is the emotion it is. It follows from this that the identity of an emotion expressed in a work of art is inextricably linked to the identity of the work of art. There is no possibility, in other words, of regarding the emotion expressed as something essentially detachable from the work in which it is manifest; there is no possibility, that is, of thinking of the emotion expressed as something that might just as well have been expressed in some other way or in some other work of art (or captured, indeed, in some chemist's cocktail).

Collingwood's insistence on this point marks his position off in the strongest way from that of the transmission theorists (with whom he has been oddly often confused); and he develops the point further: ‘Some people have thought,’ he says, that

a poet who wishes to express a great variety of subtly differentiated emotions might be hampered by the lack of a vocabulary rich in words referring to the distinctions between them… This is the opposite of the truth. The poet needs no such words at all… To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualises. (Collingwood 1938 : 112)

Expression, then, distinguishes between feelings that might be described in exactly the same terms as one another, and transforms them into the highly particularized feelings we encounter in successful works of art:

The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, ‘I want to get this clear.’ It is of no use to him to get something else clear, however like it this other thing may be. He does not want a thing of a certain kind, he wants a certain thing. (Collingwood 1938 : 114)

Description, by contrast, would yield only ‘a thing of a certain kind’. The distinction between expression and description, therefore, between arriving at ‘a certain thing’ and arriving at ‘a thing of a certain kind’, serves both to make a point that is important in itself and also to emphasize the distance between Collingwood's conception of what an artist expresses and the conceptions suggested in the remarks of Tolstoy, Wordsworth, and Eliot considered earlier. Tolstoy's ‘feeling’ that an artist ‘has lived through’, Wordsworth's emotion ‘actually exist[ing] in the mind’, and Eliot's ‘particular emotion’ are each, because construed as graspable independently of the work of art in which they are to be expressed, the stuff of description; not one of them is more than ‘a thing of a certain kind’.

On Collingwood's account, the artist arrives at self-knowledge in the relevant sense when he succeeds in transforming an unformed jumble of unclarified feeling into ‘a certain thing’. The fact that he does not—cannot—specify in advance what that thing is to be is not an indication that the business of expressing oneself is somehow random or accidental:

There is certainly here a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which an appropriate means can be thought in the light of our knowledge of its special character. (Collingwood 1938 : 111)

Knowledge of its ‘special character’ is precisely the end upon which that process is directed. The artist feels his way; he says to himself ‘This line won't do’ (Collingwood 1938 : 283), until, at last, he gets it right, and can say ‘There—that's it! That's what I was after.’ Nor is this kind of ‘directed process’ an unusual one, special in some way to the creative artist. It is an entirely familiar and everyday sort of process. Anyone who struggles to say clearly what he means, for example, is engaged in it: the struggle is directed to the end of clarifying a thought; but until the struggle has been won, no one, including the person doing the struggling, can say what, precisely, that thought is—if he could say what it was, the process of expression would already have been completed (an insight that Collingwood owes to Croce, 1922 ). This is perhaps the most significant of the ways in which Collingwood regards artistic expression as continuous with ordinary, everyday acts of expression: both may be deliberate, yet neither aims at an independently specifiable goal.

It will be apparent that Collingwood's account as I have sketched it here exactly satisfies the requirements outlined in the above section on artists. It is because the artist has succeeded in expressing himself that the work of art has the expressive character it does have; and the artist's emotion is revealed, uniquely, for the ‘certain thing’ it is by the expressive character of the work he produces. Collingwood also intends to satisfy the requirements relating to audiences, although his efforts here are expectedly more equivocal. He insists, for instance, that artists and audiences are in ‘collaboration’ with one another: the artist treats ‘himself and his audience in the same kind of way; he is making his emotions clear to his audience, and that is what he is doing to himself.’ And he cites approvingly Coleridge's remark that ‘we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets’, suggesting that when ‘someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet's expression of his, the poet's, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet's words, which have thus become his own words’ (Collingwood 1938 : 118). These thoughts culminate in the following passage: no man, he says, is ‘a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power’. Rather, ‘in his art as in everything else’,

[man] is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to others like himself. As artist, he is a speaker; but a man speaks as he has been taught; he speaks the tongue in which he was born… The child learning his mother tongue… learns simultaneously to be a speaker and to be a listener; he listens to others speaking and speaks to others listening. It is the same with artists. They become poets or painters or musicians not by some process of development from within, as they grow beards; but by living in a society where these languages are current. Like other speakers, they speak to those who understand. (Collingwood 1938 : 316–17)

If these comments, taken together, do not quite add up to a picture in which an audience's feelings reveal and are to be explained by the expressive character of the artwork that prompts them, they do at least come close; and it is certainly consistent with Collingwood's overall account that he should have endorsed such a picture. It is hard, after all, to see what else he might have had in mind when he said that someone might express ‘emotions of his own in [a] poet's words, which have thus become his own words’.

Collingwood's account of artistic expression represents a rather full working out of Everyman's proto-position within the constraints that I have outlined. The expressive artist is indeed seen as present in his work, rather than as standing, complete with his independently specifiable feelings, behind his work; and the responsive audience, in discovering what Collingwood calls ‘the secrets of their own hearts’ in his work (1938: 336), are plausibly to be construed as feeling what they feel because of the work, and as grasping what the work expresses because of those feelings. Consistently with the generality of his account, moreover, Collingwood has very little to say in addition about artworks and their specific expressive properties. A defence of his reticence on this score has been provided in Section 4 above.

6. Conclusion

It has sometimes been claimed that expression is definitive of art, usually by a band of so-called Expression Theorists, discussed under that label in the secondary literature. Tolstoy is one of these, and so is Collingwood. The secondary literature standardly goes on to refute the ‘Expression Theory’ allegedly espoused by marshalling a set of counter-examples to show that something can be a work of art without being in the least expressive. It is possible that this tactic is effective against Tolstoy. He certainly appears to think that art can be defined as expression, and to think so, the ambiguities of his position notwithstanding, in a way that makes him at least apparently vulnerable to the sort of counter-example usually offered. Collingwood, however, is immune to this tactic. He does identify art with expression: ‘art proper’, as he calls it, simply is expression. But when one recalls that what he means by this is that ‘art proper’ is the clarification of an artist's thoughts and feelings—that a work of ‘art proper’ is ‘a certain thing’ rather than ‘a thing of a certain kind’—the character of his position becomes plain. What works of ‘art proper’ have in common is that they are indeed expressions: but this is just to say that their common feature is that each one is, uniquely, what it is—and beyond that, if the position outlined here is right, there is nothing more of a general character to be said. That this conclusion follows from Collingwood's version of Everyman's account of expression in art strikes me as yet another reason to think very highly of it.

See also : Art and Emotion ; Art and Knowledge ; Value in Art ; Music .

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Expression Theory of Art

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Proponents of the expression theory of art typically claim that art should be viewed as the expression of the mind of the artist—of his or her emotions, feelings, thoughts, and ...

From: Expression Theory of Art in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics »

Subjects: Philosophy

“Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist”: Leo Tolstoy’s Essay What is Art

In his essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, defines art as a way to communicate emotion with the ultimate goal of uniting humanity.

How can we define art? What is authentic art and what is good art? Leo Tolstoy answered these questions in “What is Art?” (1897), his most comprehensive essay on the theory of art. Tolstoy’s theory has a lot of charming aspects. He believes that art is a means of communicating emotion, with the aim of promoting mutual understanding. By gaining awareness of each other’s feelings we can successfully practice empathy and ultimately unite to further mankind’s collective well-being.

Furthermore, Tolstoy firmly denies that pleasure is art’s sole purpose. Instead, he supports a moral-based art able to appeal to everyone and not just the privileged few. Although he takes a clear stance in favor of Christianity as a valid foundation for morality, his definition of religious perception is flexible. As a result, it is possible to easily replace it with all sorts of different ideological schemes.

Personally, I do not approach Tolstoy’s theory as a set of laws for understanding art. More than anything, “What is art?” is a piece of art itself. A work about the meaning of art and a fertile foundation on which truly beautiful ideas can flourish.

Most of the paintings used for this article were drawn by realist painter Ilya Repin. The Russian painter created a series of portraits of Tolstoy, which were exhibited together at the 2019 exhibition “Repin: The Myth of Tolstoy” at the State Museum L.N. Tolstoy. More information regarding the relationship between Tolstoy and Repin can be found in this article .

Who was Tolstoy?

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Leo Tolstoy ( Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) was born in 1828 in his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, some 200km from Moscow. His family belonged in the Russian aristocracy and thus Leo inherited the title of count. In 1851 he joined the tsarist army to pay off his accumulated debt but quickly regretted this decision. Eventually, he left the army right after the end of the Crimean War in 1856.

After traveling Europe and witnessing the suffering and cruelty of the world, Tolstoy was transformed. From a privileged aristocrat, he became a Christian anarchist arguing against the State and propagating non-violence. This was the doctrine that inspired Gandhi and was expressed as non-resistance to evil. This means that evil cannot be fought with evil means and one should neither accept nor resist it.

Tolstoy’s writing made him famous around the world and he is justly considered among the four giants of Russian Literature next to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev. His most famous novels are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). However, he also wrote multiple philosophical and theological texts as well as theatrical plays and short stories. Upon completing his masterpiece Anna Karenina , Tolstoy fell into a state of insufferable existential despair.

Charmed by the faith of the common people, he turned to Christianity. Eventually, he dismissed the Russian Church and every other Church as corrupted and looked for his own answers. His theological explorations led to the formulation of his own version of Christianity, which deeply influenced his social vision. He died in 1910 at the age of 82 after suffering from pneumonia.

Art Based On Beauty And Taste

Tolstoy wrote “What is art?” in 1897. There, he laid down his opinions on several art-related issues. Throughout this essay , he remains confident that he is the first to provide an exact definition for art:

“…however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”

So, what is art for Tolstoy? Before answering the question, the Russian novelist seeks a proper basis for his definition. Examining works of other philosophers and artists, he notices that they usually assume that beauty is art’s foundation. For them beauty is either that which provides a certain kind of pleasure or that which is perfect according to objective, universal laws.

Tolstoy thinks that both cases lead to subjective definitions of beauty and in turn to subjective definitions of art. Those who realize the impossibility of objectively defining beauty, turn to a study of taste asking why a thing pleases. Again, Tolstoy sees no point in this, as taste is also subjective. There is no way of explaining why one thing pleases someone but displeases someone else, he concludes.

Theories that Justify the Canon

Theories of art based on beauty or taste inescapably include only that type of art that appeals to certain people:

“First acknowledging a certain set of productions to be art (because they please us) and then framing such a theory of art that all those productions which please a certain circle of people should fit into it.”

These theories are made to justify the existing art canon which covers anything from Greek art to Shakespeare and Beethoven. In reality, the canon is nothing more than the artworks appreciated by the upper classes. To justify new productions that please the elites, new theories that expand and reaffirm the canon are constantly created:

“No matter what insanities appear in art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes of our society, a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them; just as if there had never been periods in history when certain special circles of people recognized and approved false, deformed, and insensate art which subsequently left no trace and has been utterly forgotten.”

The true definition of art, according to Tolstoy, should be based on moral principles. Before anything, we need to question if a work of art is moral. If it is moral, then it is good art. If it is not moral, it is bad. This rationale leads Tolstoy to a very bizarre idea. At one point in his essay, he states that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and his own War and Peace are immoral and therefore bad art. But what does Tolstoy exactly mean when he says that something is good or bad art? And what is the nature of the morality he uses for his artistic judgments?

What is Art?

Art is a means of communicating feelings the same way words transmit thoughts. In art, someone transmits a feeling and “infects” others with what he/she feels. Tolstoy encapsulates his definition of art in the following passages:

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hand on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”

In its essence, art is a means of union among men brought together by commonly experienced feelings. It facilitates access to the psychology of others fostering empathy and understanding by tearing down the walls of the Subject. This function of art is not only useful but also necessary for the progress and wellbeing of humanity.

The innumerable feelings experienced by humans both in past and present are available to us only through art. The loss of such a unique ability would be a catastrophe. “Men would be like beasts”, says Tolstoy, and even goes as far as to claim that without art, mankind could not exist. This is a bold declaration, which recalls the Nietzschean aphorism that human existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Art in the Extended and Limited Sense of the Word

Tolstoy’s definition expands to almost every aspect of human activity way beyond the fine arts. Even a boy telling the story of how he met a wolf can be art. That is, however, only if the boy succeeds in making the listeners feel the fear and anguish of the encounter. Works of art are everywhere, according to this view. Cradlesong, jest, mimicry, house ornamentation, dress and utensils, even triumphal processions are all works of art.

This is, in my view, the strongest point of Tolstoy’s theory. Namely, that it considers almost the totality of human activity as art. However, there is a distinction between this expanded art, and art in the limited sense of the word. The latter corresponds to the fine arts and is the area that Tolstoy investigates further in his essay. A weak point of the theory is that it never examines the act of creation and art that is not shared with others.

Real and Counterfeit Art

The distinction between real and counterfeit, good and bad art is Tolstoy’s contribution to the field of art criticism. Despite its many weaknesses, this system offers an interesting alternative to judging and appreciating art.

Tolstoy names real art (i.e. authentic, true to itself) the one resulting from an honest, internal need for expression. The product of this internal urge becomes a real work of art, if it successfully evokes feelings to other people. In this process, the receiver of the artistic impression becomes so united with the artist’s experience, that he/she feels like the artwork is his/her own. Therefore, real art removes the barrier between Subject and Object, and between receiver and sender of an artistic impression. In addition, it removes the barrier between the receivers who experience unity through a common feeling.

“In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.” Furthermore, a work that does not evoke feelings and spiritual union with others is counterfeit art. No matter how poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting it is, it must meet these conditions to succeed. Otherwise it is just a counterfeit posing as real art.

Emotional Infectiousness

Emotional infectiousness is a necessary quality of a work of art. The degree of infectiousness is not always the same but varies according to three conditions:

The individuality of the feeling transmitted: the more specific to a person the feeling, the more successful the artwork.
The clearness of the feeling transmitted: the clearness of expression assists the transition of feelings and increases the pleasure derived from art.
The sincerity of the artist: the force with which the artist feels the emotion he/she transmits through his/her art.

Out of all three, sincerity is the most important. Without it, the other two conditions cannot exist. Worth noting is that Tolstoy finds sincerity almost always present in “peasant art” but almost always absent in “upper-class art”. If a work lacks even one of the three qualities, it is counterfeit art. In contrast, it is real if it possesses all three. In that case, it only remains to judge whether this real artwork is good or bad, more or less successful. The success of an artwork is based firstly on the degree of its infectiousness. The more infectious the artwork, the better.

The Religious Perception of Art

Tolstoy believes that art is a means of progress towards perfection. With time, art evolves rendering accessible the experience of humanity for humanity’s sake. This is a process of moral realization and results in society becoming kinder and more compassionate. A genuinely good artwork ought to make accessible these good feelings that move humanity closer to its moral completion. Within this framework, a good work of art must also be moral.

But how can we judge what feelings are morally good? Tolstoy’s answer lies in what he calls “the religious perception of the age”. This is defined as the understanding of the meaning of life as conceived by a group of people. This understanding is the moral compass of a society and always points towards certain values. For Tolstoy, the religious perception of his time is found in Christianity. As a result, all good art must carry the foundational message of this religion understood as brotherhood among all people. This union of man aiming at his collective well-being, argues Tolstoy, must be revered as the highest value of all.

Although it relates to religion, religious perception is not the same with religious cult. In fact, the definition of religious perception is so wide, that it describes ideology in general. To this interpretation leads Tolstoy’s view that, even if a society recognizes no religion, it always has a religious morality. This can be compared with the direction of a flowing river:

If the river flows at all, it must have a direction. If a society lives, there must be a religious perception indicating the direction in which, more or less consciously, all its members tend.

It is safe to say that more than a century after Tolstoy’s death, “What is Art?” retains its appeal. We should not easily dismiss the idea that (good) art communicates feelings and promotes unity through universal understanding. This is especially the case in our time where many question art’s importance and see it as a source of confusion and division.

Tolstoy, L.N. 1902. What is Art? In the Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoy . translated by Aline Delano. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. pp. 328-527. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43409
Jahn, G.R. 1975. ‘The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 34, No. 1. pp. 59-65. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/428645
Morson, G.S. 2019. ‘Leo Tolstoy’. Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy

Theodor Adorno on the Essay: An Antidote to Modernity

By Antonis Chaliakopoulos MSc Museum Studies, BA History & Archaeology Antonis is an archaeologist with a passion for museums and heritage and a keen interest in aesthetics and the reception of classical art. He holds an MSc in Museum Studies from the University of Glasgow and a BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens (NKUA) where he is currently working on his PhD.

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Expressionism Art – A History of the Expressionist Movement

Expressionism existed as a period within art that abandoned realistic and accurate representations of scenes and subjects in an attempt to capture the subjective perspective of the artists. Seen as a modernist movement, Expressionism art emerged in Germany just before World War I, before spreading across the world. This broad movement developed into a niche exploration of art known as German Expressionism, which went on to define the Expressionist movement throughout its reign. In this article, we will introduce you to the style and characteristics of Expressionism, as well as its development through German Expressionism and a few famous artists who shaped it. Keep reading for more about this fascinating art movement!

Table of Contents

1.1 Precursors of the Expressionism Movement
1.2 Coining the Name of the Movement
1.3 Exploring an Expressionism Art Definition
1.4 The Development of German Expressionism
2.1 Important Groups Within German Expressionism
2.2 Die Brücke
2.3 Der Blaue Reiter
3.1 Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944)
3.2 Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944)
3.3 Franz Marc (1880 – 1916)
3.4 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938)
3.5 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884 – 1976)
3.6 Oskar Kokoschka (1886 – 1980)
3.7 Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918)
4 The Legacy of Expressionism Art
6.1 What Is Expressionism?
6.2 What Is a Suitable Expressionism Art Definition?
6.3 Which Painters Were Well-Known Within the Expressionism Art Movement?
6.4 What Artistic Groups Developed in Response to Expressionism?

An Introduction to Expressionism Art

Arising in Germany in 1905, the Expressionism years encompassed an Avant-Garde movement that leveraged exaggerations and distortions within artworks to accurately depict 20th-century life from a subjective perspective. This style of art developed before the start of the First World War and was popular during the Weimar Republic in Germany, before its decline in 1920. In addition to Expressionist painting, the movement extended itself to a wide range of artistic categories, including literature, drama, and cinema.

Seen to exist as essentially a modernist movement , Expressionism originated during a period of intense change and upheaval across Europe. During this time, society was developing at a rapid rate due to the industrialization, which took the continent by storm, as well as the chaotic state of the world that was present within countries leading up to World War I. This led to German artists responding to these two important events through the artworks they created.

The inventions within the production and communication sphere brought about a sense of apprehension among the general public. This was due to the expansion in technology in addition to the radical urban development of major cities, which resulted in intense feelings of isolation and detachment from the natural world.

These vivid emotions began filtering into art production at the time, as artists expressed their anxieties through a heightened use of color, jagged angles, flattened forms, and heavily distorted figures.

As the beginning of the First World War loomed, themes related to the grotesque appeared in Expressionist art. Artists began to experiment with printmaking, as it was an efficient way to quickly distribute their work to a larger audience. Additionally, Expressionism art tackled political and social causes, which spread far and wide, and helped carry the emotional significance present in Expressionist artists’ works beyond traditional artistic styles.

Initially, many of the Expressionist artists supported the idea of war, as they believed that it would lead to the defeat of the middle-class society, along with its widespread materialistic tendencies and cultural limitations. However, as the artists joined the cause and were recruited, their personal experience of the war destroyed their previous feelings of optimism and hope. This led to many artists experiencing mental breakdowns, with these emotions being channeled into the works they created.

Subsequently, artworks of the Expressionism movement indicated the broken minds and bodies of the artists who were affected, which gave viewers a personal insight into the gruesome world that existed on the battle lines. Thus, Expressionist art presented a distorted view of the world for an emotional effect as opposed to portraying the grim reality of war. This was done to express the emotional experiences of the artists, in addition to their raw and truthful feelings and ideas about the reality in which they lived.

In their quest for authenticity, Expressionist painters depicted the world exactly as it felt rather than how it looked, taking inspiration from the bold, vibrant, and introspective paintings that were created in the Post-Impressionist era. Artists dismissed the predominant stylistic conventions that had dictated visual creation at the turn of the 20 th century in an attempt to reinvigorate art with conviction and an expressive force.

Precursors of the Expressionism Movement

The origins of the Expressionism movement can be linked to artists such as Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse . Each artist began to display signs of a departure from lifelike portrayals in their later works, as they preferred to capture the personal thoughts and outlooks of their subjects.

Thus, the style of Expressionism made subjective thoughts a defining aspect of the movement, as artists rejected realistic and precise representations in favor of exaggerations and distortions that they believed to carry a greater impact.

Out of the artists who were thought to influence the development of Expressionism, Munch and Van Gogh existed as the leading pioneers of movement, as it was their artwork that held the most influence over the movement’s distinct characteristics. Both artists made use of unnatural colors, dynamic brushstrokes, and overstated textures within their works, which went on to become essential characteristics of Expressionism art. This resulted in artworks that offered a subjective view of the current reality that existed, as the works gave a glimpse into the mind of the artists at the time.

Munch’s The Scream , painted in 1893, exists as a prominent example of the beginning of Expressionism. Very little attention was given to an accurate portrayal of the subject and the landscape, as a ghoulish figure is seen standing in a background of whirling lines and harsh, contrasting colors. In doing so, Munch managed to convey the deep pain and intense anguish of the figure, which was seen as more important than the actual style and composition of the work.

Coining the Name of the Movement

The term “Expressionism” was popularized by several writers in 1910 but was supposedly coined by Czech art historian Antonin Matějček, who intended the term to mean the opposite of Impressionism. Where Impressionist artists were thought to look externally to the real world when capturing instances such as nature and the human form, Expressionists were said to search inwards for a deeper meaning, so as to accurately express the landscape of their inner lives.

This distinction in style was created through the harsh subject matter that was depicted, as well as the unrestrictive brushwork, jagged forms, and intense colors. While some artists refused to refer to themselves as “Expressionists”, the notion of the movement was so revolutionary at the time that the term “Expressionism” came to represent many styles of Contemporary art . The movement also sparked the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, also recognized as the New Objectivity movement as a response to the emotional intensity of Expressionism.

Exploring an Expressionism Art Definition

Expressionism as an art movement was very broad and thus, was difficult to define. This was because it overlapped with other major movements within the modernist period, such as Vorticism, Cubism, Futurism , Surrealism, and Dadaism. Expressionism also spanned across different countries, mediums, and periods, meaning that it could not be defined by a strict set of aesthetic principles.

Rather, Expressionism was viewed as a tool of expression and social critique. While the term mainly applied to artworks that were created in the 20 th century, it encompassed all works that were made in reaction to the dehumanizing impact of industrial development and the expansion of cities.

The label “Expressionism” sometimes conjured up feelings of angst, as depicted by the artwork that was created, as the movement existed as an artistic style that sought to portray subjective emotions and responses of ordinary people.

The Development of German Expressionism

As industrialization continued to grow in Europe, artists who started the Expressionism movement migrated to larger cities, bringing with them their ideas surrounding art creation. This led to other artists breaking away to form the subsequent German Expressionism movement , which was characterized by two notable groups known as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter .

Die Brücke , which formed in 1905, was seen as the founding group of the German Expressionist movement, with Der Blaue Reiter only forming in 1911. Although both groups did not refer to themselves as German Expressionist groups, they shared studios, exhibited alongside each other, and went on to publish their works and texts together.

The Expressionism art movement emerged in various cities across Germany in response to the widespread anxiety that arose as an after-effect of industrialization. Artworks portrayed the increasingly despondent relationship that individuals held with both society and nature in the chaos that existed before and during World War I. Due to its success, Expressionism went on to inform other movements like Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism, and as such, it can be argued that the style continues to thrive today.

Characteristics and Influences of Expressionism Art

When considering this movement, it can be easy to wonder “What is Expressionism?” The style of Expression originally began in Germany and Austria, where a group of artists began creating artworks that made use of certain characteristics. These were works that centered around capturing emotions and feelings as opposed to what subjects looked like.

Striking colors and bold brushstrokes were used to emphasize the emotions that were present, which highlighted the importance of emotional expression over a realistic interpretation.

The Expressionist art movement demonstrated a heavy influence from other early 20 th century movements such as post-Impressionism, Fauvism , and Symbolism. Artists made use of characteristics belonging to other movements when creating Expressionist art, which can be seen in their inclination to make use of arbitrary colors and discordant compositions, as inspired by the Fauves in Paris.

A primary characteristic of the Expressionism art movement was the exaggeration of subject matter. This, combined with swirling and swaying brushstrokes, managed to accurately express the turbulent emotional state that artists found themselves in, as a response to their anxieties about the modern world. Through their stark confrontation with the early-20 th century urban world, artists were able to powerfully insert social critique into their work, which existed as an important characteristic.

This frank depiction of subject matter effectively demonstrated the new principles that existed when art was created and judged. Art was now meant to portray the inner worlds of the artists themselves rather than drawing from a mere depiction of the visual world. The artist’s feelings became more important when assessing the quality of an artwork, as an evaluation of the compositional aspects was no longer regarded as important.

Thus, the representations of the modern city were sinister, as artists created alienated figural interpretations of individuals. These detached renderings were said to represent the turmoil and chaos that was present within their psyche at the time due to the growing emotional distance that existed in society. This separation, which became an ever-present characteristic within Expressionism artworks, was seen as a major consequence of the rapid urbanization that had occurred.

Important Groups Within German Expressionism

Once the Expressionism movement had started, two distinct groups were formed by artists, which encompassed the different styles and characteristics that were used. These groups, known as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, led to the specific production of German Expressionism art during the movement’s existence. Below, we will discuss the different groups of German Expressionism that will inform your broader understanding of Expressionism.

Founded by artists Ernst Ludwig-Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Fritz Bleyl, the Die Brücke group was formed in Dresden in 1905. Existing as a non-conformist collective of Expressionist artists, the Die Brücke group was influenced by the works of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, and went on to create art that went against the conservative social order of Germany. However, all four founding members were only architecture students at the time, with none of them ever receiving any formal art education.

The name of the group, Die Brücke, was chosen to emphasize their shared desire to create a bridge connecting the past and the present, as the word brücke simply translates to “bridge.” Additionally, the name was inspired by a passage of writing from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writing was considered a fundamental influence on the development of Expressionism.

The artists within Die Brücke sought to escape the boundaries of contemporary middle-class life by experimenting with a heightened sense of color within their works, which was thought to represent the raw emotion that existed within society. Additionally, the direct and simplified approach that was taken when rendering form produced provocative representations of modern society and demonstrated the freedom of sexuality that was experienced.

While artists portrayed city inhabitants, bolder works went on to depict prostitutes and dancers working in the city’s streets and nightclubs. This daring portrayal created artworks that introduced “the degenerate underbelly” of German society at the time. Unlike the pastoral scenes that were created by Impressionists, members of Die Brücke purposefully sought to distort forms through the use of artificial colors in order to elicit a visceral and emotional response from viewers. Die Brücke collaborated and exhibited works until the group was dissolved in 1913. This was due to a writing piece of Kirschner, titled Chronik der Brücke (Brücke Chronicle) , which signaled the ending of the group within the same year as the article.

Der Blaue Reiter

Coming into existence after Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter was formed in 1911 by artists Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke , Paul Klee, and Franz Marc. Due to the increasing separation they experienced within the ever-modernizing world, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter attempted to surpass the ordinary within art through pursuing the spiritual worth of art instead. The artists of Der Blaue Reiter demonstrated a tendency to portray abstraction, symbolic content, and spiritual reference within their works, as they aimed to convey emotional aspects of being through their highly symbolic and vividly colored depictions.

Despite never publishing a manifesto, the group was unified through their aesthetic developments, which were influenced by Primitivism and Medieval art forms, including Fauvism and Cubism. The name of the group, Der Blaue Reiter, arose from the symbol of a horse and rider, which was derived from one of Kandinsky’s paintings. Thus, the group was related to the recurring theme of a rider on horseback taken from Kandinsky’s period of Munich artworks. For Kandinsky, the rider was thought to represent the transition from the real world into the spiritual one, as it acted as a metaphor for the group’s artistic techniques. The name also symbolized Kandinsky and Marc’s love for the color blue, which they believed to possess spiritual qualities.

Kandinsky believed that simple colors and shapes could help viewers to better perceive the moods and feelings that were present within the paintings, with this theory further encouraging him towards increased use of abstraction in his works. For other members of the group, the symbolism of the name became a central tenet when delving deeper into the world of abstraction within the artworks they created.

Unfortunately, just like Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter was a short-lived group. Due to the start of World War I in 1914, both Marc and Macke were drafted into the German military and shortly killed in battle. This forced the remaining members of the group to return home, which led to the immediate dissolution of the group. Despite both groups existing for a brief period, each had a tremendous influence on the Expressionism movement within Germany. Expressionism continued as the dominant artistic style in Germany following the end of the war, with its popularity beginning to fade around 1920.

The movement was later revived during the 1970s in the form of Neo-Expressionism, which spread to the United States and led to the development of Figurative Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism.

Famous Expressionist Artists and Their Artworks

Throughout the lifespan of the Expressionism movement, many significant artworks were made notable artists, which went on to define the trajectory of the movement. A few of these important artists have been listed below, along with their Expressionism painting that remains iconic today.

Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944)

Seen as one of the greatest influences and principal precursors of the Expressionism movement, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch created frenzied artworks that expressed the anxiety of European individuals due to the recent modernization of society. The late 19th-century painter emerged as a prominent source of inspiration for other Expressionist artists, as his energetic and emotion-filled artworks created new potential for introspective expression within art.

Before Expressionism, Munch was part of the Symbolist movement and created artworks that were heavily influenced by Impressionism and post-Impressionism . Throughout his career, which spanned almost 60 years, Munch targeted scenes of agony, death, and anxiety within his works. He achieved this through creating deformed and emotionally charged portraits, with this style going on to inform the primary characteristics of Expressionism.

The Scream , painted in 1893, exists as his most notable work, as well as one of the most iconic Modern artworks in the world. Within his work, Munch depicted the conflict that existed between spirituality and modernity at the time, which became a central theme in his works. This work is based on Munch himself, as it recounts his experience of being left behind by two of his friends and hearing a shrill scream of nature. Thus, the work portrays the battle that existed between the individual and society within the Modern era.

This work was inspired by a fleeting moment and was celebrated for its ability to represent the profound feelings of angst and anxiety that filtered into early modernist society. Munch recalled walking across a bridge in Oslo when the sky turned blood red, which filled him with fear and secured him to the spot before he heard an infinite scream. When viewing the work, one can see that the scream was felt by the figure, as it immerses him completely while simultaneously piercing both the environment and his soul.

The portrayal of Munch’s emotional response to a scene would go on to form the foundation of the works produced by Expressionists. By the start of 1905, Munch was spending a lot of time in Germany, which put him into direct contact with the movement. There, his themes of alienation in his work developed, which fascinated Expressionist painters and became a central feature within Contemporary art. Today, two versions of The Scream exist, with one located at the Munch Museum in Oslo and the other at the Oslo National Gallery.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944)

An important figure of the Der Blaue Reiter group was the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who founded the group and produced the German Expressionism art piece that gave the group its name. A pioneer in abstraction within Modern art, Kandinsky went on to create artworks that acted as a bridge between the post-Impressionism and Expressionism movements. Due to this, his work went encountered some stylistic changes, as it developed from realistic and natural to geometric and abstracted.

Kandinsky’s first and most important Expressionist work was painted in 1903 and was titled Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) , which was used as the name for the Expressionist group. This artwork exists as an excellent example of Kandinsky’s shift between artistic movements and styles since it demonstrates both his Impressionist and Expressionist influences. Impressionism is shown through the techniques and style, while Expressionism is seen through the thick and bold colors, as well as the rough brushstrokes.

Der Blaue Reiter shows a misleadingly simple image, as a lone horseback rider dressed in blue is depicted galloping through the fields. However, it represents a critical moment in Kandinsky’s growing pictorial language, as the sun-streaked hillside reveals his interest in contrasting lightness and darkness, in addition to him capturing both stillness and movement within the same image.

The work’s abstracted character invites viewers to interpret the scene, with this canvas becoming the symbol of the expressive possibilities that were welcomed by the Expressionism artists.

Franz Marc (1880 – 1916)

Another founding member of Der Blaue Reiter was German artist Franz Marc, who was fascinated with animals and known for his use of animal symbolism within his artworks. Practicing art as a painter, printmaker, and watercolorist, Marc was a key member of the Expressionist group who gave a deep emotional and psychological meaning to the colors he used within his works. Marc made use of the color blue within his most well-known works, as he believed it to symbolize potent masculinity and spirituality.

Marc depicted his animal subjects in a profoundly emotional way, with his work utilizing vivid colors in an attempt to move away from realistic depictions towards a more spiritual and authentic portrayal of his subjects. Due to the symbolism within color, Marc carefully selected his palette to accurately convey the emotive qualities he aimed to express, so as to correctly convey his vision.

His most well-known work, painted in 1911, was titled Large Blue Horses and was shown in the first exhibition put on by Der Blaue Reiter. This artwork featured many vivid and contrasting primary colors encompassing the main subject, which includes three blue horses. The color of the horses, which was seen as symbolic, along with the soft curvature depicted within their bodies, established feelings of harmony, serenity, and balance against the harsh red hue of the background and hills.

Marc stated that this noticeable difference demonstrated the contrast that existed between peaceful spirituality and violence, with his serene artwork evoking a sense of superiority. This artwork, which made more use of bright colors and cubist techniques than some other artworks at the time, belonged to a series of works that centered around the theme of horses. Marc regarded horses to be symbols of spiritual renewal, hence their prominence within the series.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938)

A notable artist belonging to Die Brücke was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , whose work was typically defined by bold and blocking colors, wide and conflicting brushstrokes, and sharp-edged angular forms. Kirchner took inspiration from the works of post-Impressionist artists such as Edvard Munch , who influenced his use of expressive colors.

Kirchner was most famous for his numerous depictions of Berlin street scenes, with these scenes becoming the most famous within his catalog of work. Additionally, his most notable artwork, painted in 1913, came from this street scene category and was titled Street, Berlin . This artwork depicted Kirchner’s disdainful outlook on life in Berlin, demonstrated by the extremely sharp brushstrokes and unsettling color contrasts used.

Within this artwork, the faces of the subjects are indistinguishable from each other, which emphasized the empty superficiality of the high life in Berlin. A sense of claustrophobia and confusion is created from the way the figures are standing, as the titled ground implies that they are possibly falling out of the painting itself. In doing this, Kirchner created a remarkable portrayal of the alienation that existed in urban settings, which was emphasized through the interchangeability of the figures.

Without regard for a realistic interpretation of the form of the figures, Kirchner made a bold choice in positioning two prostitutes as the painting’s focal point . These two women, also unidentifiable except for their plumbed hats, add to the confusion and alienation that was innate to modern society due to the sudden loss of spiritual fellowship.

Kirchner emphasized the rapid development of urban culture by depicting individuals who were seen as “simple commodities” and prostitutes, who were considered worthy subjects.

As a founding member of Die Brücke, Kirchner established a new way of painting that visibly rejected Impressionistic inclinations and the need to accurately portray figures within paintings. This was demonstrated through his use of sharp colors, jagged brushstrokes, and lengthened forms that were adopted by members of Die Brücke to change the stylistic traditions of painting.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884 – 1976)

An additional co-founder of Die Brücke was Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, whose paintings represented the urban alienation and turmoil that existed within contemporary life at the time. His artworks were often exaggerated and sharp as he reduced the figures and scenes within his works to their simplest forms to produce what he viewed to be “authentic” expressions.

After Die Brücke began, Schmidt-Rottluff moved to Berlin where he began to paint scenes of the city. His most well-known work, titled Houses at Night was created in 1912 and depicted an abstract city block. Within this artwork, Schmidt-Rottluff depicted an unsettling empty street with buildings that staggered apart from each other at alarming angles. This was said to demonstrate the the alienation that was present in modern urban society.

The glowing colors of the buildings give off an intensity and energy that seems to seep away within the composition, creating an uncomfortable juxtaposition between the bright blocks and the empty street. Additionally, the primitive shape of the buildings permeates the canvas with a pervasive unease and alienation, which was depicted as the essence of modern life within this Expressionist painting.

Oskar Kokoschka (1886 – 1980)

A notable Austrian artist within the Expressionism movement was Oskar Kokoschka, who was best known for his intense landscapes and portraits. While Kokoschka refrained from adopting the techniques and ideologies that trademarked as German Expressionism art, he greatly admired the sense of community that was established between group members in their rebellion against traditional art.

His most iconic work was Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat , which was commissioned by the esteemed art historians themselves and painted in 1909. Kokoschka focused on the inner drama that he observed in his subjects, as demonstrated by the nervous hands that were made into the central point of their anxiety within this work.

Kokoschka stated that his depiction of the couple was based on how he perceived their psyche as opposed to their physical attributes.

The colorful background and concentrated brushstrokes of the figures were representative of the techniques used within Expressionism, as well as the heightened emotion that Kokoschka included. Additionally, the swirling and abstracted colors obscured the background and enclosed the subjects in a frenzied and depthless depiction of space within the painting.

Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918)

Egon Schiele was another central figure of Austrian Expressionism. Schiele was known for his harsh and often grotesque depictions of sexuality within his artworks, as he was influenced by the controversial artistic manner of Gustav Klimt and his iconic painting, The Kiss (1907-1908). Displaying such overt eroticism as a major theme within his works often led Schiele to the scrutiny of harsh critics and he was even imprisoned for promoting “indecency” in his paintings in 1912.

However, his altercations with the law did not seem to deter him from his erotic depictions, as he continued to produce paintings with this central theme. Accordingly, Schiele’s most well-known work, painted in 1917, portrayed this theme and was titled Sitting Woman with Legs Drawn Up . Within this artwork, Schiele drew his wife, Edith, who was partially dressed and sitting on the floor with her body in an unusual position.

Her intense expression assuredly confronted viewers and contradicted the traditional standards of submissive feminine beauty. Due to this, the portrait is bold and suggestive, displaying definite themes of eroticism. Edith’s fiery red hair created a striking contrast with her vibrant green shirt, adding to the confidence she seemingly possessed. Additionally, her casual pose established an intimate moment with viewers, demonstrating the emotionality within the work.

Despite being blatantly controversial throughout his artistic career, Schiele is nevertheless recognized for the skills he possessed and the emotive quality of his line work and color choice, which placed him decidedly in the Expressionist movement. Thus, Schiele portrayed images exactly as he saw them as opposed to how they appeared to the outside world.

The Legacy of Expressionism Art

The Expressionism art movement was indeed revolutionary and wide-ranging, as it went on to inspire various offshoot movements and influence the development of Contemporary art. The Expressionist movement was not a discrete one since artists practicing this style experimented with techniques from other movements. This experimentation went on to affect several artistic genres which followed Expressionism, including Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism , and Surrealism.

Several Expressionists also lost their lives during World War I, either from fighting, trauma, or illness as a result of the war. Due to this, the movement fell out of favor within the immediate post-war period and was indefinitely closed by the Nazi dictatorship in 1933. Expressionist artists were labeled as degenerates by Nazis and their artworks were taken out of galleries and seized.

However, Expressionist art paved the way for the development of later art movements with its characteristics still existing in artistic practices today.

An important avant-garde development of Expressionism was Abstract Expressionism, which originated in the post-war era in the United States, between the 1940s and 1950s. In this style, artists explored powerful emotions through the use of striking colors and aesthetic brushstrokes, as demonstrated in the works of Jackson Pollock . After this, Neo-Expressionism started to develop in the late 1970s and 1980s as a reaction to the Conceptual art and Minimalist art movements that existed at the time, displaying the far-reaching influence of Expressionism.

Expressionism Art in Other Forms

Due to the rapid expansion of Expressionism art, this style influenced the development of a variety of other art forms. Of these different forms, the most notable artistic spheres, where characteristics of Expressionism can be seen includes cinema and drama.

Within the German Expressionist movement, an important art form that developed was German Expressionist Cinema. The reason for its importance is because it was one of the first artistic genres that had a significant impact on the expansion of modern filmmaking, which allowed the development of numerous Avant-Garde styles that have taken place since then.

Initially, most Expressionist films were developed due to the alienation that Germany experienced leading up to the start of World War I, however, a demand for this experimental film genre soon began to grow and by the early 1920s, German Expressionist Cinema had reached an international audience. This led to many European filmmakers playing around with the techniques of Expressionist cinema when producing various films.

After experiencing the horrors caused by the war, Expressionist cinema began to blossom. Notable examples of this type of cinema include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , produced in 1920, The Golem: How He Came into the World , produced in 1920, and Metropolis , produced in 1927. All three films have a sinister and unsettling undertone, which was said to represent the turmoil and horror that existed within society after the war had ended.

The Expressionism movement was a powerful influence on the development of early 20th-century German theatre, with the most notable playwrights including Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser. During the 1920s, Expressionism found its way to the United States, where it also had a significant influence over theater, with its influence extending into the development of early modernist plays.

In addition to producing visual art, Austrian Oskar Kokoschka was a playwright who wrote what has often been described as the first Expressionist drama. This play, titled Murderer, The Hope of Women , was written in 1909 and follows the story of an anonymous man and woman who struggle for dominance. Both individuals cause pain, with the man burning the woman while she stabs and imprisons him. He later frees himself and she dies at his touch. The man then murders everyone around him and the play ends on an unsettling note.

Expressionist plays often dramatized the spiritual awakenings and sufferings of their protagonists, with some playwrights using an episodic dramatic structure to heighten these emotions which were modeled according to the suffering and death of Jesus. Expressionist dramas also exaggerated the struggle against upper-class values and traditional authority, which was frequently embodied by the father figure within the plays.

Characters within Expressionist plays were simplified to mythic types, choral effects, theatrical dialogue that was rhapsodic yet clipped and elevated the emotional intensities of the story. These attributes became characteristics of later Expressionist plays. Additionally, the staging was an important element within these dramas, as directors chose to forgo the illusion of reality and lock actors in a two-dimensional space. Notable Expressionist playwrights to emerge from these developments include Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Samuel Beckett.

At the beginning of the 20th century, vast shifts in artistic styles and ideas broke out in response to the major changes that occurred within the structure of modern society. Due to the urbanization that occurred, as well as the outbreak of World War I, the perspective of individuals shifted significantly, with many artists reflecting on the landscape of their inner turmoil. Thus, artists tapped into incredibly raw and true emotions in an attempt to portray how the events of the world had affected society.

Take a look at our Expressionism webstory here!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is expressionism.

The Expressionism art movement refers to artworks that focused on interpreting the intense inner emotions that were experienced by artists and society at the time, as opposed to physical reality. Artists focused their works on depicting these emotions accurately, which were in response to the mass urbanization that had occurred, as well as the beginning of World War I. The Expressionism years spanned from 1905 to around 1920.

What Is a Suitable Expressionism Art Definition?

Due to the Expressionism art movement being so broad, it was somewhat difficult to accurately define. Expressionism overlapped with a variety of other art movements, with some of these techniques making their way into Expressionism art. Thus, an appropriate definition encompasses art that valued emotional expression over the depiction of Realism.

Which Painters Were Well-Known Within the Expressionism Art Movement?

Important artists of the Expressionism art movement included Wassily Kandinsky , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. Additionally, two important precursors to the movement were Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh .

What Artistic Groups Developed in Response to Expressionism?

Within the Expressionism movement, German Expressionism was a significant development in Berlin. The two groups falling under this movement were classified as Die Brücke (1905-1913) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911-1914).

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Expressionism Art – A History of the Expressionist Movement.” Art in Context. April 13, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/expressionism-art/

Meyer, I. (2021, 13 April). Expressionism Art – A History of the Expressionist Movement. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/expressionism-art/

Meyer, Isabella. “Expressionism Art – A History of the Expressionist Movement.” Art in Context , April 13, 2021. https://artincontext.org/expressionism-art/ .

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ARTISTIC EXPRESSION AS INTERPRETATION

According to R. G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art, art is the expression of emotion-a much-criticized view. I attempt to provide some groundwork for a defensible modern version of such a theory via some novel further criticisms of Collingwood, including the exposure of multiple ambiguities in his main concept of expression of emotion, and a demonstration that, surprisingly enough, his view is unable to account for genuinely creative artistic activities. A key factor in the reconstruction is a replacement of the concept of expression with that of interpretation: what artists do is to interpret, rather than express, their initial emotions, in creative ways that may go far beyond their initial impulses. Thus more broadly the paper attempts to show that the concept of interpretation is just as central to understanding artistic creativity as it is in the analysis of the critical appreciation of artworks. In this paper I shall provide some groundwork for an attempt to rehabilitate an expression theory of art, which is similar in some ways to that proposed by R. G. Collingwood.

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Jose Juan Gonzalez

The aim of this exposition is not to defend Collingwood's explanation of art, but to show important errors of interpretation that have become a common place in the objections that are made against his proposal. To accomplish it, I pretend to take a close look to the criticisms to his theory made by one of the most important exponents of the aesthetics of the analytical tradition, George Dickie. I have chosen him because he both summarizes and has contributed to extend quite well the general tone of the objections against Collingwood's account of art. These mainly focus on the understanding of art as imagination, on the definition of art as expression of emotion, and on the relation between these two approaches to art. By their analysis, I hope to give some clues to help in a better understanding of these concepts in Collingwood's philosophy of art, not only because of the historical value that this might have, but because of the light that Collingwood's approach to art can throw upon contemporary reflections on the relation between art, emotion and value.

Anne Reboul

In his 1976 book, Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman tackles the difficult problem of expression: what does it mean to say that such and such a work of art express sadness/melancholy/hapiness/etc.? His answer is that such utterances dealing with works of art are metaphorical and that expression should be defined as metaphorical exemplification, that is as reference to the property

On-line Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics

Jenefer Robinson

Ian Verstegen

Perception of expression distinguishes our cognitive activity in a pervasive, significant and peculiar way, and manifests itself paradigmatically in the vast world of artistic production. Art and Expression examines the cognitive processes involved in artistic production , aesthetic reception, understanding and enjoyment. Using a phenomeno-logical theoretical and methodological framework developed by Rudolf Arnheim and other important scholars interested in expressive media, Alberto Argenton considers a wide range of artistic works, which span the whole arc of the history of western graphic and pictorial art. Argenton analyses the representational strategies of a dynamic and expressive character that can be reduced to basic aspects of perception, like obliqueness, amodal completion and the bilateral function of contour, giving new directions relative to the functioning of cognitive activity. Art and Expression is a monument to the fruitful collaboration of art history and psychology, and Argenton has taken great care to construct a meaningful psychological approach to the arts based also on a knowledge of pictorial gen-res that allows him to systematically situate the works under scrutiny. Art and Expression is an essential resource for postgraduate researchers and scholars interested in visual perception, art and Gestalt psychology.

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Philosophia

The final official version is here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-020-00252-z Abstract In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms (distinguishing mood as well), and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restricting the discussion to the art of painting (and drawing), I sketch a partial psychological model for the exrtistic expression of feelipression of feeling. Although the feeling-emotion contrast is seldom made clear in their writings, I stress that many, or even most of the eminent pre-1960’s voices in aesthetics and art criticism—Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet, Berenson and others—would more or less agree that feeling is no less important for expression than emotion, and indeed can be interpreted as anticipating many points that I set forth.

Blanca M Molina

The task of artistic interpretation has always been an arduous task in art history, criticism, philosophy of art, aesthetics, and a wide range of humanist studies. An incredible amount of academics within humanities devote themselves to comment upon art and curiously enough have turn art criticism into one of the essentialisms of a work of art, even above art creation. To this extent, it seems that we have reached a point in which it could be possible to affirm that there are even more art critics than artists, a relevant fact that we should consider to ponder upon. Because, can you imagine an artist interpreting their own work and reflecting upon the intrinsic meaning of his/her own work of art? In this paper I will try to address the issue of the complex situation in which contemporary aesthetics is immersed, focusing specially in the difficult relationship between artists and art critics as well as the role they play in their " internalized job " as mediators between art works and art viewers and their self-consideration as " meaning revealers. " It is true that there are many cases in which literary theory is even more fascinating that art works themselves, but how is it possible than one simple poem or artwork gives birth to thousands of pages of printed matter? The truth is that in the contemporary era it is quite impossible to find artistic productions disconnected from artistic analysis. But curiously enough, nowadays we live in a time in which the act of interpretation has gone too far, to an absurd point of entanglement that is difficult to elude. Nowadays, contemporary criticism is an amalgam of reflections upon –isms that has reached a theoretical space of unanswearability. It makes no sense at all to continue on that line of constant accumulation of abstract ideas about artistic meaning revelation. At the core of the purpose of this essay I would like to state the inherent incongruences in the persistent intentions of " understanding " art.

jay odenbaugh , Becko Copenhaver

In this essay, we provide an account of the basic emotions and their expression. On our view, emotions are experiences that indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. Emotions are also objects of experience: our perceptual systems are more or less sensitive to the expression of emotion in our environment by features that indicate and have the function of indicating emotions. We apply our account to expression in art. What does it mean to say that an artwork expresses sadness? Is perceiving joy in an artwork the same kind of experience as perceiving joy in a friend’s face? How may artworks express emotions without having emotions or any other mental states? In the next section, we provide an overview of unrestricted representationalism about experience. In section three, we offer a representationalist account of the basic emotions that combines exteroception and interoception. On our view, emotions are perceptual experiences that represent properties of our viscera and properties in our extra-bodily environment. Exteroceptive and interoceptive systems combine to constitute a system whose states—emotions—indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. In the fourth section, we survey aesthetic theories of expression in art including the resemblance, persona and arousal theories, and argue that each faces significant problems. Building on the work of Dominic Lopes (2005) and Mitchell Green (2007), we offer a teleosemantic account of emotional expression in art that is impersonal and continuous with a representationalist account of the basic emotions. Finally, in section five, we apply our view to an example—Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—in order to illustrate how we experience emotions as represented properties of a painted canvas.

Published by the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts Leiden University

Bart Verschaffel

This article was written as a lecture for the emeritus celebration of prof. Janneke Wesseling (Leiden University) in June 2022 One must distinguish between asking 'what a work (does or does not) say' (= its 'meaning') and asking 'what the work is about' (= its aboutness). The subject or issue of a work, what it is about, is not a 'message' that is said. Art is always about something, and that means that it presents something, raises something, talks about something, opens a conversation... One cannot limit the 'aboutness' of art and inscribe it in an essentialist definition of what art is. But art is indeed - retrospectively, historically and therefore factually - mainly about certain issues. History has excavated a bed in which art flows today, and which serves as a frame of reference for what art can be and can possibly do. Art concerns issues that every society faces because, anthropologically speaking, they concern basic facts of human existence and the human condition. This historical ‘aboutness’ of art concerns, schematically, three issues. First of all: art is about the image. Art still remains the only or most important place where the understanding, production and use of the image can be historically and critically framed, and discussed. Art is therefore relevant and potentially interesting, when it deals with what an image is and does. Secondly: Art is about the aesthetic gaze and the aesthetic approach of the world: that special, artificial kind of attention to the way in which reality immediately presents itself, and isolates it, abstracts it from the meaning, use and value of things. The exclusive focus on 'first appearance' places this basic condition in brackets, and places us in a hazardous and potentially dangerous relationship to things can be socially very disrespectful, cruel and disruptive. In Western culture, the aesthetic gaze has its own well-defined place and play field in the arts. Within art, it is then possible to experiment fairly freely, without great danger, with the appearance of things, and to test the elasticity of the aesthetic approach. Finally: art deals with the 'poetic'. The poetic is the effect of meaning that comes with the failure, with the not immediate succeding, of ‘reading’ the work of art, when this is experienced as an obstacle and a riddle. The poetic is in the language what the distance is in the landscape. Riddle games exercise in enduring and mastering incomprehensibility. Art is interesting when it is, in some way, about what images are and do, and thus contributes to the 'taming' of the image; when it is about experimenting with the 'aesthetic'; when it varies on reenacting the confrontation of the profoundly incomprehensible.

johnrapko.com

The following is a condensed proto-draft of a lecture on expression in contemporary art. The lecture considers works by Frank Bowling, Nam June Paik, and Carol Trindade as rejecting what M. H. Abrams termed 'expressivist theory', that is, the theory that a work of art primarily communicates to a suitably attuned viewer the artist's mental states, moods, emotions, and/or feelings. Some of Theodor Adorno's essays are considered in light of their contribution to articulating this rejection in favor of the idea that more recent art is more a playing with conventions wherein expressiveness emerges as a result of the artistic process, rather than being pre-supposed by that process.

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What Is The Expression Theory Of Art Essay

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Art has evolved and regenerated itself many times during our human existence. These differences are defined through changes in styles under various theories. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a style known as Expressionism became popular. During this movement the artists were trying to use their artwork as a tool of expression toward life. It was mainly dominant in the nonrepresentational arts, such as abstract visual arts and music. It also was probably one of the most difficult movements to understand because the whole point of the piece lay within the artist.

Not only was it a movement, it defined the act of art as a whole. From the beginning of time, each work of art, excluding replicas, show a way of expressing one’s self. Every artist puts a piece of his or herself into their artwork. Who really is to determine what that work of art was meant to express? One might ask, “Since most artwork is used as a way for an artist to express him or herself, what makes this expression period anything special? ” On the general level “Expressionistic art, whether literature, painting, music, or cinema, often involves intense psychic disturbance and distortion in the perspective adopted by the artwork.

“It is remote from the objective or realistic portrayals of the world, as well as from the happier emotions. ” To bring a more defined meaning to the overall theory of expressionism, two philosophers play a large role. The first notarized expressionistic philosopher was the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy who was followed by his counterpart R. G. Collingwood: a twentieth-century English philosopher. Together they hold the two best known expositions of the expression theory. What make these two analyzers important is not what they agreed on, but rather on how they contrasted.

They both conclude that during the expression theory, the main concern was to express emotion. The one question that draws the two apart is “What does it mean to express an emotion? ” They attempt to conclude this question, by providing the answers to a few others. What the nature of art is? Why we make and appreciate art? Why the arts are so valuable? The best way to go about describing their thoughts is to state one of the thinkers discoveries followed by a thorough investigation of the second’s, beginning with Leo Tolstoy.

He begins his argument by trying to decide what is the value of art? How do we determine its value to the public, since art is a social aspect of life? For Tolstoy, the value of art comes from the function art serves in society and in human historical development. Art appears in everything that lives and should have the force to bring people together as a community. For him expressionism in art is a means of communication, in such as a language. Therefore, language can be described as a form of art under the theory of expressionism.

Speech transmits the thoughts and experiences of mankind, serving as a means of expression among them; art also acts in a similar manner by sharing emotions. If people could not be affected by art, we would still be in the era of savagery. Referring back to the author of our book, John Fisher, emotional communication is essential to art. Fisher also states that too much harnessed emotion will tend to lower the value of art. What can we define as art and what can we exclude? For Tolstoy, a piece to be considered art must surpass a few requirements.

First, the piece of work must express deep and unique feeling and emotion. Second, the artist must intentionally produce an external artwork, which transmits feeling and emotions to the audience. Finally, the artwork must portray the same emotions that the author intended. The only one of these that can fall short of being perfect, is the final one, for which in this case, the artwork is just considered unsuccessful. Here the objective reality is the inner feelings of the artist to be communicated to the external receptor through the piece of art.

It all centralizes to emotions vs. non-art. Using the chain link format, fitted with Tolstoy’s theory, the Nature of Art can be split into extending categories. Under Tolstoy’s theory, the immediate Nature of Art would be the intuitive expression impact the work has over the audience. Following, would be the artist’s feelings and the art’s universality. Here the value of art is in its enrichment of man culturally. If you view this all in a combined sense, art equals language, which equals the sharing of our emotional lives.

Therefore there is an external objective that needs to be viewed by our senses unintentionally. This is how the artist and the audience becomes one. An example of this could be shown through music. If you put music into a three stage event, you would have the musician (who is expressing the externalized formulation), then the music as reflective emotions (the artwork), and finally the audience (the expressive emotion). Tolstoy views the arousal view as requiring prior knowledge of their own emotions before expressing them, not spontaneous.

This leads to emotional understanding vs. ntellectual understanding. Collingwood’s theory on the other hand states sees the expression of art in the exploration of disposition and emotional experience from a particular perspective; the experience of art is neither the calculated arousal of emotion in an audience nor the pre-established formulization of culture. Collingwood sees real emotion as individual and contextual. This concept conflicts with the arousal methods that are planned. For him, both the artist and the audience are equals. For Tolstoy the audience is essential to expression.

Collingwood sees expression as a relationship between the artist’s feelings and the artwork. The audience is not necessary for the artist to express his or her emotions. Collingwood has a theory of his own, which he calls Corruption’s of Consciousness. Here the emotion is not honest and understood as a statement by the artist or with the audience that does not want to willingly experience the emotion. Art can also be individualistic, where any gesture or efforts by anyone at any given time if conceived and understood in a correct manner can be considered art.

Are emotions the creator of art? For a piece of artwork to be successful, does everyone in the audience have to feel the same emotions? Can one have negative emotions toward a work and it still be considered art? For Collingwood the same artwork can have different expressive qualities. For example, the same work of art can share expressive qualities of gaiety, melancholy, and anxiety. It can be forceful and even portray serenity. These different emotions are necessary in order to make moral assessments of the world.

For this art acts as a metaphor, which needs not express deep feelings in order to be successful. Feelings are relative to emotions, which are either true or false. As Jerrold Levingson points out, ” there is a paradox in supposing that we experience real emotions when we experience artworks. ” “Many of the emotions identified with artworks are unpleasant. ” “Why would we seek out these emotions in art if we avoid them in real life? “” “Yet we do seek out artworks that involve negative emotions. “This paradox constitutes an objection to Tolstoy’s version of expression theory since Tolstoy does propose that genuine art actually moves the audience to feel the emotions that the artist attempts to convey.

” You can divide Levinson’s emotional theory into two separate components: the cognitive and the effectual. The cognitive would be initiated with belief, followed by one’s attitude and desire and then finally evaluated. The effectual components are the comprehensive feelings that occur; these are correspondent real life events. If the music does not evoke a real emotional response in a listener, according to this school of thought, this response should be considered inappropriate. ” No matter whose view you take they all have their faults. Making a theory on art is not the same as making a theory in science. With science you have guidelines that can be proven. There are very few guidelines in art that can be backed up by fact. The ideal of defining a theory in art is based on emotions as well. Both Tolstoy and Collingwood are using their emotions in order to judge other emotions.

If I were forced to pick a philosopher to side with, I would probably lean toward Collingwood, since he leaves more area for variety. He places more of the wealth of the emotional art within the artist themselves rather than a third party. If it were totally up to me I would leave the decision on whether a work is good or not between the artist and whomever was viewing it at that time. What I might think as a good piece of work and what might evoke emotions in me might not do the same for another who might consider themselves experts, but does that really make my opinion less valuable?

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The Expression Theory of Art: A Critical Evaluation Essay (Critical
Scholars have come up with different theories of art; one among them is the expression theory. The theory was developed during the Romantic Movement, which reacted against C18th classicism and placing the artist at the focal point of his or her work. Accordingly, art work is believed to portray the exceptional, individual stance and sentiments ...
Philosophy of art
Philosophy of art - Expression, Aesthetics, Creativity: The view that "art is imitation (representation)" has not only been challenged, it has been moribund in at least some of the arts since the 19th century. It was subsequently replaced by the theory that art is expression. Instead of reflecting states of the external world, art is held to reflect the inner state of the artist.
Tolstoy's "What Is Art?"
Leo Tolstoy, in his essay What Is Art? . ^ has provided us with a lively and influential defence of the view that art is the expression of emotion, a view now commonly referred to as the Expression Theory of Art or Emotionalism . Art, on this view, is the expression of a man's emotions in some artistic medium which beoomes the vehicle for
Tolstoy and the Expressionist Theory of Art
Tolstoy speaks of this creative process as "evoking" in oneself a "feeling one has once experienced" in order to transmit that feeling to others "by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words.". Tolstoy, p. 10. Art must have its genesis in the genesis of feeling in the artist.
Dewey's Theory of Expression
work art, what gives it its artistic identity, is possession of "expressive qual-ities." Thus 'expression' applies to the creative act and the outcome of this act. This is why Expression theorists tried to explain the product in terms of the act. Tormey selects Dewey's version of the Expression theory for critical anal-
Artistic expression
The emotion is constituted through the act of expression, having no prior identity; that is, the emotion achieves its particular character through the manner of its expression. Collingwood regards art as expression at the level of imagination; for Croce, art is intuitive expression. Both tend to dismiss creation that does not satisfy this model ...
PDF An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art
expression, conceptual art, Hegel, and art and society. Drawing on classical and contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and art criticism, Richard Eldridge explores the representational, formal, and expressive dimensions of art.He arguesthat the aestheticand semantic density ofthe work, in inviting
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism. A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists ...
1.3: What is the Connection between Artworks and Emotions?
The first one is generally termed the Expression Theory of Art: if artworks can be described with the vocabulary of emotions, as expressing emotions, it is because they express the artist's emotions. An additional feature is that this expression of the artist enables the audience to experience these emotions.
Art and Emotion
The theory of art in which the abiding philosophical interest in the connection between art and emotion is most explicit is expression theory, of which there have been several, significantly different, versions. Common to all of these is the thought that the value of art lies at least largely in the value of its expression of emotion; but ...
Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Abstract. Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction is an exploration of art, what it means, and why we value it. It examines topics in the field loosely called art theory: ritual theory, formalist theory, imitation theory, expression theory, cognitive theory, and postmodern theory. It considers some of the philosophers from Plato onward who have ...
Essay on What Is The Expression Theory Of Art
Art appears in everything that lives and should have the force to bring people together as a community. For him expressionism in art is a means of communication, in such as a language. Therefore, language can be described as a form of art under the theory of expressionism. Speech transmits the thoughts and experiences of mankind, serving as a ...
Expression in Art
That the expression of emotion is among the principal purposes or points of art is a thought with a pedigree stretching back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks. Nor, so stated, is it a thought that many have wanted to oppose. Even the staunchest cognitivist or moral improver has granted that expression is one of the points of at least some art, however much he or she may have wanted to ...
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Expression Theory of Art. in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics Length: 4830 words. Search for: 'Expression Theory of Art' in Oxford Reference ». Proponents of the expression theory of art typically claim that art should be viewed as the expression of the mind of the artist—of his or her emotions, feelings, thoughts, and ...
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Expression, by contrast, belongs to the aesthetic character of a work of art if anything does. And this is borne out by an interesting distinction: you can appreciate the expression of a work only by attending to it, and hearing the 14 emotion of it. Turn your attention away and the experience vanishes".
The Expression Theory of Art
The expression theory of art is the most effective and sufficient method for interpreting the meaning of art and understanding what the artist was feeling emotionally. ... In Tolstoy's essay, What is Art?, he said, "To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines ...
"Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist": Leo Tolstoy's Essay What is Art
Tolstoy's theory has a lot of charming aspects. He believes that art is a means of communicating emotion, with the aim of promoting mutual understanding. By gaining awareness of each other's feelings we can successfully practice empathy and ultimately unite to further mankind's collective well-being.
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An Introduction to Expressionism Art. Arising in Germany in 1905, the Expressionism years encompassed an Avant-Garde movement that leveraged exaggerations and distortions within artworks to accurately depict 20th-century life from a subjective perspective. This style of art developed before the start of the First World War and was popular during the Weimar Republic in Germany, before its ...
Feeling, emotion and imagination: in defence of Collingwood's
This claim is grounded in the weakest part of The Principles, an unfortunate excursion into a bog of ideas concerning relations among language, art and expression (The Principles of Art, chs. IX, X). Those ideas seem peripheral to the main expression theory, and so could perhaps be jettisoned without undermining it.
(PDF) ARTISTIC EXPRESSION AS INTERPRETATION
According to R. G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art, art is the expression of emotion-a much-criticized view. I attempt to provide some groundwork for a defensible modern version of such a theory via some novel further criticisms of Collingwood, including the exposure of multiple ambiguities in his main concept of expression of emotion, and a demonstration that, surprisingly enough, his ...
What Is The Expression Theory Of Art Essay
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