An art movement dominant in Germany from 1905-1925, that opposed naturalism and impressionism. Expressionist artists tried to form their inner experience rather than real forms. Many of the them were influenced by the traumatic experiences of World War I.
Abstraction refers to art unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world, not excluding the referring to an object or image which has been distilled from the real world. Artwork that reshapes the natural world for expressive purposes is called abstract; that which derives from, but does not imitate a recognizable subject is called nonobjective abstraction. In the 20th century the trend toward abstraction coincided with advances in science, technology, and changes in urban life, eventually reflecting an interest in psychoanalytic theory. Later still, abstraction was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freedom from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs.