Contains 256 printed pages of text with colour and monochrome illustrations throughout.

German Expressionists were uneasy and angry. Emerging at the dawn of the 20th century, they railed against Christian and bourgeois values as much as rampant urban industrialization. Anti-imperialist, they were dispersed, shattered, and depleted by the horrors of the First World War, and rallied their efforts only to be officially erased by the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937.

In this comprehensive TASCHEN collection, director of the Gerhard Richter Archive Dietmar Elger gathers the many artists and elements of this urgent, scattered, complex movement into one authoritative overview of its protagonists, principles, and essential role in 20th-century modernism. Finding a critical calm amid the frenzy of color and distortion, the book distills Expressionism’s leading collectives, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, as well as its regional characteristics across its Berlin and Munich hubs, and its North German, Rheinland, and Viennese variants.