Expressionism, an international movement in the visual arts as well as in literature, film, and theater, flourished in Germany between 1905 and 1925. The artists championed idealist values and sought to break free from the traditional restrictions of bourgeois society. They were principally concerned with expressing emotion and inner psychological truth.

The founding members of the pioneering German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge)—Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl—created images of anxiety and the social alienation experienced in the growing metropolis prior to the outbreak of World War I. Their paintings, sculptures, and prints showed the influence of “primitive” art, with its simplified forms, deliberately crude figuration, and powerful, often jarring juxtapositions of color. The members of the more stylistically diverse group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which was founded in 1911 by Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Gabriele Münter, developed nonrepresentational images related to spiritual concepts.

For many Expressionist artists, World War I was a cataclysmic event that transformed their art. While the war brought disillusionment, further alienation, and death to many, it proved to be a core subject for the Expressionists. The subsequent revolution of 1918 provided an opportunity for the artists to join together in an idealistic effort to radically reshape modern society.

The museum has a particularly rich collection of German Expressionist art—paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and illustrated books. The collection was built through purchases and gifts beginning in 1946, when German-born William Valentiner became codirector of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art (the precursor of LACMA). In the 1980s, LACMA established the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. This comprehensive collection includes approximately seven thousand works on paper and a library of more than four thousand volumes, many containing original graphics, which were key to the accomplishments of the Expressionists. These holdings include not only superior impressions of woodcuts and lithographs by Kirchner, Heckel, Emil Nolde, and Kandinsky, but also rare periodicals and portfolios by Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Pechstein, as well as numerous examples from lesser-known artists.