Surrealism, Expressionism, Nabis & Other Styles Artists Index
Alphabetical Index of the Great Masters of Surrealism, Expressionism, Nabis & Other Styles
The Nabis were a circle of painters active chiefly in Paris during the 1890s, whose work emphasized expressive color, simplified forms, and the deliberate organization of the painted surface. The group took shape in 1888 among young artists associated with the Académie Julian. Their name derived from the Hebrew word for prophets and conveyed their ambition to renew painting. Paul Gauguin’s example encouraged them to treat observation as material that could be transformed through memory, imagination, and decorative invention.
Paul Sérusier’s “The Talisman” (1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) became a touchstone for the group. Painted at Pont-Aven under Gauguin’s guidance, this small wooden panel presents a riverside landscape through concentrated patches of yellow, green, and blue. Trees and reflections participate in the same arrangement of colored shapes. Sérusier brought the work back to Paris and showed it to his fellow students. In 1890, Maurice Denis articulated a related principle: the relationships between colors on a flat surface were fundamental to a painting, whatever story or subject it represented.
Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard gave particular attention to familiar surroundings, including meals, gardens, and domestic interiors. Japanese prints helped shape their interest in unusual viewpoints, cropped figures, and broad areas of pattern. Vuillard’s “Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist” (1893, Museum of Modern Art, New York) draws the viewer into a compressed room where clothing and wallpaper compete for attention. The mother’s dark dress forms a stable mass, while the sister’s checked dress approaches the surrounding pattern. The placement of these surfaces determines how readily each figure separates from the room.
The Nabis accommodated considerable differences of temperament. Denis brought Christian devotion and a measured rhythm to many of his compositions, while Félix Vallotton developed sharply outlined domestic scenes charged with uncertainty between their inhabitants. Painted panels offered opportunities to organize figures, foliage, and repeated motifs across extended surfaces. By around 1900, the artists were increasingly following separate paths. Bonnard and Vuillard continued to develop their treatments of color and everyday experience for decades, and many of their best-known mature paintings belong to this later period.
Expressionism emerged in the early twentieth century, particularly in Germany and Austria, using distorted forms, intense color, and emphatic handling to give visible shape to subjective experience. Earlier paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch provided important precedents. Munch’s “The Scream” (1893, National Museum, Oslo) predates the principal German Expressionist groups. Its wavering figure and sweeping bands of sky turn a recognizable landscape into an image of extreme anxiety. The firm diagonal of the railing intensifies the instability of the surrounding curves.
Die Brücke was founded in Dresden in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and three fellow artists. Its members painted streets, studios, bathers, and landscapes with abrupt contours and forceful contrasts of color. Kirchner’s “Street, Berlin” (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in the year the group disbanded, concentrates the pressures of metropolitan life into a crowded vertical composition. Two fashionably dressed women stand among men whose bodies and faces form a restless succession of angles. The compressed space and oblique movements make passing through the street seem physically uneasy.
Der Blaue Reiter formed in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, with Gabriele Münter and August Macke among its important participants. This loose association explored the emotional and spiritual possibilities of color. Kandinsky increasingly developed compositions in which lines and colored forms operated independently of recognizable objects. Marc’s “Blue Horse I” (1911, Lenbachhaus, Munich) gives an animal an intensely blue body within a landscape of rounded hills. The curves of the neck, back, and surrounding terrain establish a measured rhythm. Color helps construct an idealized relationship between the animal and its environment.
In Austria, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka made the human figure a principal site of expressive investigation. Schiele’s tense contours, exposed limbs, and angular poses intensified the vulnerability of his sitters. Kokoschka used restless brushwork and charged gestures to give portraits an unsettled psychological presence. The First World War disrupted artistic networks, and Expressionist artists later faced Nazi persecution and the confiscation of their work. Their approaches to the figure, landscape, and painted surface continued to inform later generations of painters.
Surrealism established its program in Paris with André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Emerging from the aftermath of the First World War and the experiments of Dada, it drew on Sigmund Freud’s writings about dreams and the unconscious. Painters explored desire, unexpected associations, and the unstable boundary between familiar experience and imagined events. Giorgio de Chirico’s earlier pictures of deserted squares and enigmatic objects provided important precedents. Surrealist painting developed several distinct methods, ranging from spontaneous marks to meticulously constructed scenes with impossible relationships between their elements.
André Masson experimented with automatic drawing, allowing lines to develop before their possible subjects became clear. Max Ernst used grattage, scraping paint across a canvas laid over textured surfaces, to generate patterns that could suggest forests or strange creatures. Joan Miró developed a language of signs, wandering lines, and organic shapes. His “Carnival of Harlequin” (1924-1925, Buffalo AKG Art Museum) fills a room with animated objects and hybrid beings. Eyes, instruments, and small colored forms circulate across the canvas. Repeated shapes and carefully distributed intervals give this apparent commotion a precise pictorial rhythm.
Salvador Dalí pursued a highly detailed form of Surrealist painting. In “The Persistence of Memory” (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York), soft watches hang over rigid supports within a sharply illuminated landscape. Their altered consistency unsettles ordinary assumptions about objects and measured time. The precise rendering of shadows and distance gives the improbable scene a persuasive physical presence. Yves Tanguy developed another version of this spatial clarity, placing unidentified, smoothly modeled forms across expanses whose scale and location remain uncertain.
René Magritte examined the relationship between images, language, and recognition. “The Treachery of Images” (1929, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) presents a carefully painted pipe above a sentence drawing attention to the difference between the object and its representation. A convincing likeness still cannot perform the function of the thing it depicts. The restrained background and clear contours make the problem immediately accessible. Elsewhere, Magritte altered scale, concealed faces, or placed familiar objects in unexpected settings, allowing ordinary appearances to generate persistent uncertainty.
Surrealism developed internationally and continued through wartime displacement and postwar experimentation. Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo established major bodies of work in Mexico, exploring transformation, myth, ritual, and imaginative forms of knowledge. Carrington populated her paintings with encounters between human and animal beings; Varo constructed intricate worlds of journeys, mysterious apparatus, and absorbed activity. Dorothea Tanning gave rooms, doorways, and the body an unsettling capacity for change. These artists expanded the subjects and experiences represented within Surrealist painting, carrying its investigations well beyond the Parisian circle of the 1920s.
Paul Sérusier’s “The Talisman” (1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) became a touchstone for the group. Painted at Pont-Aven under Gauguin’s guidance, this small wooden panel presents a riverside landscape through concentrated patches of yellow, green, and blue. Trees and reflections participate in the same arrangement of colored shapes. Sérusier brought the work back to Paris and showed it to his fellow students. In 1890, Maurice Denis articulated a related principle: the relationships between colors on a flat surface were fundamental to a painting, whatever story or subject it represented.
Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard gave particular attention to familiar surroundings, including meals, gardens, and domestic interiors. Japanese prints helped shape their interest in unusual viewpoints, cropped figures, and broad areas of pattern. Vuillard’s “Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist” (1893, Museum of Modern Art, New York) draws the viewer into a compressed room where clothing and wallpaper compete for attention. The mother’s dark dress forms a stable mass, while the sister’s checked dress approaches the surrounding pattern. The placement of these surfaces determines how readily each figure separates from the room.
The Nabis accommodated considerable differences of temperament. Denis brought Christian devotion and a measured rhythm to many of his compositions, while Félix Vallotton developed sharply outlined domestic scenes charged with uncertainty between their inhabitants. Painted panels offered opportunities to organize figures, foliage, and repeated motifs across extended surfaces. By around 1900, the artists were increasingly following separate paths. Bonnard and Vuillard continued to develop their treatments of color and everyday experience for decades, and many of their best-known mature paintings belong to this later period.
Expressionism emerged in the early twentieth century, particularly in Germany and Austria, using distorted forms, intense color, and emphatic handling to give visible shape to subjective experience. Earlier paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch provided important precedents. Munch’s “The Scream” (1893, National Museum, Oslo) predates the principal German Expressionist groups. Its wavering figure and sweeping bands of sky turn a recognizable landscape into an image of extreme anxiety. The firm diagonal of the railing intensifies the instability of the surrounding curves.
Die Brücke was founded in Dresden in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and three fellow artists. Its members painted streets, studios, bathers, and landscapes with abrupt contours and forceful contrasts of color. Kirchner’s “Street, Berlin” (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in the year the group disbanded, concentrates the pressures of metropolitan life into a crowded vertical composition. Two fashionably dressed women stand among men whose bodies and faces form a restless succession of angles. The compressed space and oblique movements make passing through the street seem physically uneasy.
Der Blaue Reiter formed in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, with Gabriele Münter and August Macke among its important participants. This loose association explored the emotional and spiritual possibilities of color. Kandinsky increasingly developed compositions in which lines and colored forms operated independently of recognizable objects. Marc’s “Blue Horse I” (1911, Lenbachhaus, Munich) gives an animal an intensely blue body within a landscape of rounded hills. The curves of the neck, back, and surrounding terrain establish a measured rhythm. Color helps construct an idealized relationship between the animal and its environment.
In Austria, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka made the human figure a principal site of expressive investigation. Schiele’s tense contours, exposed limbs, and angular poses intensified the vulnerability of his sitters. Kokoschka used restless brushwork and charged gestures to give portraits an unsettled psychological presence. The First World War disrupted artistic networks, and Expressionist artists later faced Nazi persecution and the confiscation of their work. Their approaches to the figure, landscape, and painted surface continued to inform later generations of painters.
Surrealism established its program in Paris with André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Emerging from the aftermath of the First World War and the experiments of Dada, it drew on Sigmund Freud’s writings about dreams and the unconscious. Painters explored desire, unexpected associations, and the unstable boundary between familiar experience and imagined events. Giorgio de Chirico’s earlier pictures of deserted squares and enigmatic objects provided important precedents. Surrealist painting developed several distinct methods, ranging from spontaneous marks to meticulously constructed scenes with impossible relationships between their elements.
André Masson experimented with automatic drawing, allowing lines to develop before their possible subjects became clear. Max Ernst used grattage, scraping paint across a canvas laid over textured surfaces, to generate patterns that could suggest forests or strange creatures. Joan Miró developed a language of signs, wandering lines, and organic shapes. His “Carnival of Harlequin” (1924-1925, Buffalo AKG Art Museum) fills a room with animated objects and hybrid beings. Eyes, instruments, and small colored forms circulate across the canvas. Repeated shapes and carefully distributed intervals give this apparent commotion a precise pictorial rhythm.
Salvador Dalí pursued a highly detailed form of Surrealist painting. In “The Persistence of Memory” (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York), soft watches hang over rigid supports within a sharply illuminated landscape. Their altered consistency unsettles ordinary assumptions about objects and measured time. The precise rendering of shadows and distance gives the improbable scene a persuasive physical presence. Yves Tanguy developed another version of this spatial clarity, placing unidentified, smoothly modeled forms across expanses whose scale and location remain uncertain.
René Magritte examined the relationship between images, language, and recognition. “The Treachery of Images” (1929, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) presents a carefully painted pipe above a sentence drawing attention to the difference between the object and its representation. A convincing likeness still cannot perform the function of the thing it depicts. The restrained background and clear contours make the problem immediately accessible. Elsewhere, Magritte altered scale, concealed faces, or placed familiar objects in unexpected settings, allowing ordinary appearances to generate persistent uncertainty.
Surrealism developed internationally and continued through wartime displacement and postwar experimentation. Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo established major bodies of work in Mexico, exploring transformation, myth, ritual, and imaginative forms of knowledge. Carrington populated her paintings with encounters between human and animal beings; Varo constructed intricate worlds of journeys, mysterious apparatus, and absorbed activity. Dorothea Tanning gave rooms, doorways, and the body an unsettling capacity for change. These artists expanded the subjects and experiences represented within Surrealist painting, carrying its investigations well beyond the Parisian circle of the 1920s.