A Vienna dentist took paintings in payment for his care, and wanted one back in a hurry when visitors were coming to see his collection. A painter whose dancers the Nazis branded degenerate had joined a Nazi group himself. Expressionism lived on such contradictions, and so do these twelve canvases.
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How These Were Chosen
Expressionism paints what a scene does to the painter rather than what it looks like. Color that no real light could produce, brushstrokes left visible, bodies stretched out of proportion: each carries a feeling straight onto the canvas.
The name spread around 1910, to set the new painting against Impressionism, which painted light as it reached the eye. The movement grew in Germany and Austria from about 1905 to 1920, and the First World War broke up most of its groups.
Each picture here was chosen because a feeling decides what is on the canvas, whether a color, a bent wall or a face left blank, and because there is a story behind that choice. They run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Edvard Munch, Madonna (1894)
One arm of the woman in Edvard Munch's Madonna is raised behind her head, and the other disappears behind her back. She is naked, leaning back with her eyes closed, long black hair falling over her shoulders, and where a room or a sky would normally be, wavy bands of brown, blue green and red surround her.
Munch painted her in 1894, while he belonged to a circle of writers and artists in Berlin. He made five painted versions of the subject, and this one, in Oslo, is the first.
That raised arm was not his first idea. In 2021, infrared photographs of the canvas revealed an earlier drawing under the paint. In it, both arms hang down along the body, a traditional pose, closer to an ordinary portrait.
So Munch changed his mind on the canvas itself. The study concluded that he was "hesitant about how to place the arms," and it also dated this first version to 1894.
The title says where the picture was heading. Madonna is the name Christians give the Virgin Mary, and Munch even gave his woman a halo, painted red instead of gold and shrunk to a thin band on her black hair. In a note from around 1894 to 1895, he wrote that "the woman in a state of abandon" acquires "the painful beauty of a Madonna."
At a Glance
Artist: Edvard Munch (1863 to 1944)
Painted: 1894
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 90.5 × 70.5 cm (35.6 × 27.8 in)
Where to see it: National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo
11. Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin (1909)
The face in Gabriele Münter's portrait of Marianne von Werefkin is yellow green. It sits under an enormous hat whose brim is covered with orange, blue and green flowers, and the sitter, a Russian painter known in Munich as "the Baroness," looks back over her shoulder, a wide violet scarf around her pale upper body.
Behind her lies a flat field of corn yellow that nothing in the picture explains. Münter painted it in 1909 in Murnau, a small town south of Munich, where a single summer had changed the way she painted.