Well my first though was "Gee, expressionism sounds like expressing", which I now know is no coincidence considering that expressionism is all about the expression of feelings. Yes that's what all art is, but with expressionism, that's really all it revolves around. It's not about ideas, stories, or plots. It is more concerned with conveying emotion. I think anything more that, that can be found in expressionist art is the source of our imagination rather than the actual art itself. For example, when you see a painting of a little girl all alone standing in a field, your mind automatically begins making assumptions about who she is, why she's there, what she's thinking ect., but all the painting it really offering you is feelings of loneliness or perhaps curiosity. Yet there is no way to know if that was the artists intention. Maybe he really was trying to convey a detailed and in depth story about this little girl. There's no way to know. It seems that, by passing something off as expressionist, what you're really doing is simplifying something that is too complex for you to understand otherwise. So is expressionism a way of approaching art intellectually rather than creatively? It seems that way to me. I'm not saying that this is good or bad, or even if I like it or not (because I'm not really sure yet). All I'm saying is that it's interesting.
