German Expressionism: Modern Painting 1900–1918 runs at the National Gallery from 20 March to 1 August 2027, gathering fifty works.
The story of early twentieth-century art is usually told through Paris — Picasso, Braque, cubism, the sequence that leads to abstraction. German Expressionism is the other line, and it was doing something different: not breaking the object into planes but distorting it until it carried feeling. Die Brücke formed in Dresden in 1905, Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1911, and between them they produced the hot colour, the cut lines and the woodcut roughness that most people now recognise as the look of anxiety.
It was also the movement the Nazis attacked first, as degenerate art, which is why so much of it left Germany and why the works are now scattered across collections worldwide. Kirchner, Nolde, Marc, Kandinsky and Kollwitz are the names, and the printmaking is where the movement is at its most concentrated, because a woodcut cannot be softened.
The National Gallery gathers fifty of them from Saturday 20 March to Sunday 1 August 2027, borrowed from around the world, and frames the show as the alternative story of the period. Four and a half months takes it across the whole of the London Season. For a building whose collection stops around 1900, an exhibition arguing about what came after it is a departure, and the fifty pictures will have to do a good deal of work.