expressionistn.adj.

1850 Tait's Edinb. Mag. July 394/2 The expressionist school of modern painters.

1880 Papers Manch. Literary Club 6 184 The expressionists..who undertake to express special emotions, or passions.

1914 W. Lewis in Blast June 143 Of all the tags going, ‘Futurist’..serves as well as any for the active painters of to-day... We may hope before long to find a new word. If Kandinsky had found a better word than ‘Expressionist’ he might have supplied a useful alternative.

1914 W. Lewis in Blast June 144 Balla..is a rather violent and geometric sort of Expressionist. His paintings are purely abstract.

1915 W. Lewis in Blast July 39/1 There have grown up three distinct groups of artists in Europe... The third group is formed by the expressionist movement, that is Kandinsky.

1915 Observer 1 Aug. 5/6 The reviled Post-Impressionists,..Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Vorticists of to-day may be the honoured masters of to-morrow.

1920 Arts & Decoration XIII. 88/3 Arnold Schönberg, the musical expressionist—who also painted.

1921 J. Galsworthy To Let i. i. 13 Expression! Ah, they were all Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent... He wondered where this—this Expressionism—had been hatched. The thing was a regular disease!

1924 New Statesman 2 Aug. 494/2 Elmer Rice's play, The Adding Machine..has two or three expressionist scenes, but is for the most part not in the expressionist manner.

1927 Observer 11 Sept. 6 A cocaine romance written by one of the most gifted of those men who joined the band of expressionists early in the movement.

1938 Oxf. Compan. Music 303/2 The music of the composers who call themselves Expressionists..is..simply ‘ultra-emotional’.

1962 Listener 20 Sept. 453/1 The peculiar tension of the characteristic Expressionist instrumental form lies in the aphoristic compression of a dreamlike state.