ABSTRACT
The various sayings and proclamations of Expressionism only tell that what the Expressionist is looking for is without parallel in the past. A new form of Art is dawning. And he who beholds an Expressionist picture by Matisse or Picasso, by Pechstein or Kokoschka, by Kandinsky or Marc, or by Italian or Bohemian Futurists, agrees; he finds them quite unprecedented. And if the beholder retorts vehemently that the painter should express nothing but what he sees, the Expressionists assure him that they too paint only what they see. All the history of painting is therefore in a sense also a history of philosophy, especially of unwritten philosophy. Never has any period found a clearer, a stronger mode of self-expression than did the period of bourgeois dominance in Impressionistic art. The Expressionist tears open the mouth of humanity; the time of its silence, the time of its listening is over - once more it seeks to give the spirit's reply.
