expressionism

noun

• a style of painting, music, or drama in which the artist or writer seeks to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world.

  Expressionists characteristically reject traditional ideas of beauty or harmony and use distortion, exaggeration, and other nonnaturalistic devices in order to emphasize and express the inner world of emotion. The paintings of El Greco and Grünewald exemplify expressionism in this broad sense, but the term is also used of a late-19th- and 20th-century European and specifically German movement tracing its origins to Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, which insisted on the primacy of the artist’s feelings and mood, often incorporating violence and the grotesque