ABSTRACT
The designation “expressionist” was first associated with French rather than German art by the quintessential Englishman and art critic, Roger Fry, as his first attempt at a title for the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London in November 1910. The early British interest in Munch before the First World War, a Norwegian artist who had his greatest successes in Germany rather than Norway, and who would be seen by many critics and art historians as a pathfinder for the expressionist generation, is intriguing. The generation of expressionists engaged in war “most clearly demonstrate its disintegrating and more catastrophic influence”; they were “men who sought wood in order to give expression in a cathartic sense to their feelings.” Fry referred to the expressionist generation as “German imitators of the French,” but “imitators” who appeared to be suffering from a “kind of artistic bad manners.”.
