Expressionism vs Fauvism
表現主義 / フォーヴィスム
Both sit in Avant-garde, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Expressionism
Painting what was felt rather than what was seen. Warped forms, violent brushwork and unnatural color moved the anxiety of the city and the age straight onto the surface.
Fauvism
A short-lived movement that severed colour from the depiction of its subject, slamming pure hues onto the canvas as flat planes. The brushstroke itself carries the contour, and adjacent complementaries make the surface vibrate. It became the starting point for every later design that uses colour as a device of emotion.
| Expressionism | Fauvism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1905–1930s | 1904–1908 |
| Family | Avant-garde | Avant-garde |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Distorted form / Unnatural color / Rough brush and cut / Urban anxiety | Pure colour straight from the tube / Complementaries set directly side by side / Bare white ground left unpainted / Rough brushstrokes doubling as contours |
| Best used for | Hitting an emotion directly, giving up accurate description to do it · Protest work printed from rough woodcuts in unnatural color | Announcing a festival or event with no photography, letting saturated colour carry it · Painting outdoor walls or banners so the lift of the colour carries from a distance |
| Type | Cut the letters by hand and keep the tremor and unevenness | Brush lettered forms, nothing geometric, read by complementary against the ground |
| Composition | Drop perspective, press figures against the edge, leave unstable gaps | No drawn contour, form set only where colours meet, bare ground left breathing |
| Material | Set complements side by side, keep the cut marks and paint body | Unmixed saturated pigment, vermilion, viridian and cobalt, laid thick on untouched white |
| Caution | Distortion applied evenly as an effect erases what the feeling is about, and the picture looks like realism with a filter over it. | Covering the whole surface with strong colour stops the vibration between neighbours and leaves noise. Always keep the bare white ground that lets the clash register. |