表 现 主 义 和荒 诞 派 戏剧Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.12 Expressionist artists sought to express meaning3 or emotional experience rather than physical reality.34Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,1 particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.The term is sometimes suggestive of emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grnewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as naturalism and impressionismOrigin of the termWhile the word expressionist was used in the modern sense as early as 1850, its origin is sometimes traced to paintings exhibited in 1901 in Paris by an obscure artist Julien-Auguste Herv, which he called Expressionismes. 6 Though an alternate view is that the term was coined by the Czech art historian Antonin Matjek in 1910, as the opposite of impressionism: An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself. (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures. Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence .and are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols. 7Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it overlapped with other major isms of the modernist period: with Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism and Dada. 11 Richard Murphy also comments: the search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging expressionists such as Kafka, Gottfried Benn and Dblin were simultaneous the most vociferous anti-expressionists. 12What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early twentieth-century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities, and that one of the central means by which expressionism identifies itself as an avante-garde movement, and by which it marks its distance to traditions and the cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation. 13 More explicitly: that the expressionists rejected the ideology of realism. 14The term refers to an artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. 15 It is arguable that all artists are expressive but there are many examples of art production in Europe from the 15th century onward which emphasize extreme emotion. Such art often occurs during times of social upheaval, such as the Protestant Reformation, German Peasants War, Eight Years War, and Spanish Occupation of the Netherlands, when the rape, pillage and disaster associated with periods of chaos and oppression are presented in the documents of the printmaker. Often the work is unimpressive aesthetically,citation needed yet has the capacity to cause the viewer to experience extreme emotions with the drama and often horror of the scenes depicted.Expressionism has been likened to Baroque by critics such as art historian Michel Ragon 16 and German philosopher Walter Benjamin.17 According to Alberto Arbasino, a difference between the two is that Expressionism doesnt shun the violently unpleasant effect, while baroque does. Expressionism throws some terrific fuck yous, baroque doesnt. Baroque is well-mannered.18American Expressionism22 and American Figurative Expressionism, particularly the Boston figurative expressionism,23 were an integral part of American modernism around the Second World War。Major figurative Boston Expressionists included: Karl Zerbe, Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, David Aronson. The Boston figurative Expressionists post World War II were increasingly marginalized by the development of abstract expressionism centered in New York City.After World War II, figurative expressionism influenced worldwide a large number of artists and styles. Thomas B. Hess wrote that the New figurative painting which some have been expecting as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism was implicit in it at the start, and is one of its most lineal continuities.24N