We know today that the traditions of tribal art are more complex and less "primitive" than its discoverers believed; we have even seen that the imitation of nature is by no means excluded from its aims. But the style of these ritualistic objects could still serve as a common focus for that search for expressiveness, structure, and simplicity that the new movements had inherited from the experiments of the three lonely rebels: Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin.
The experiments of Expressionism are, perhaps, the easiest to explain in words. The term itself may not be happily chosen, for we know that we are all expressing ourselves in everything we do or leave undone, but the word became a convenient label because of its easily remembered contrast to Impressionism, and as a label it is quite useful. In one of his letters, Van Gogh had explained how he set about painting the portrait of a friend who was very dear to him, The conventional likeness was only the first stage. Having painted a "correct" portrait, he proceeded to change the colors and the setting.
Van Gogh was right in saying that the method he had chosen could be compared to that of the cartoonist. Cartoon had always been "expressionist", for the cartoonist plays with the likeness of his victim, and distorts it to express just what he feels about his fellow man. As long as these distortions of nature sailed under the flag of humor nobody seemed to find them difficult to understand. Humorous art was a field in which everything was permitted, because people did not approach it with prejudices. Yet there is nothing inconsistent about it. It is true that our feelings about things do color the way in which we see them and, even more, the forms which we remember. Everyone must have experienced how different the same place may look when we are happy and when we are sad.
What upset the public about the Expressionist art was, perhaps, not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty. For the Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty were only born out of a refusal to be honest. The art of the classical s, of a Raphael or Correggio, seemed to them insincere and hypocritical. They wanted to face the bare facts of our existence, and to express their compassion fur the disinherited and the ugly.
Expressionism is a(n)