You prefer expressionist genre scenes. Let’s see how these paintings are different from all the rest. Expressionists magnified misery as the basic substance of being, and so they pictured the real world as the source of all kinds of distress.

Misery is treated differently by expressionists, romanticists and realists. Romanticists, for instance, suffered in an obvious and dynamic way, they fought the injustice and tried to right all wrongs, they never seemed to accept the world and themselves.

Realists, on the other hand, suffered in cold blood – in a very typical and consistent way, according to their family, professional and social status, their suffering being not individual but inherent to a TYPE of people.

Expressionist misery is sustainable, overwhelming and unvoiced, part of the human nature and the core of human existence. In their genre scenes expressionists depicted events or phenomena that discreetly or directly emanate misery. Even the paintings featuring people laughing have a weird gloomy quality, the laughter being excessive to the point of suffocating that people seem to be gasping for air. That’s what makes expressionist genre scenes so gut-wrenching and disturbing.

The effect was achieved through the well-considered choice of artistic devices and techniques. The saturated intense colours enter into conflict, in many cases they are unnatural and deeply symbolic – take, for instance, Picasso’s “blue period” screaming of anguish and loneliness. The contrast of colours was amplified by the rough winding lines and contours comprising an array of smaller brushstrokes that go merging and intersecting, interacting in a serpentine manner. The scale and proportions are distorted, the figures, faces and objects are deformed to debunk the myth of universal harmony and to claim misery to be the inherent handicap of a man and the world. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, everything around yields anxiety and oppression – the heavy solid sky, the ultrayellow café in the dark of the night, the faceless passers-by, the bare-teeth smiles, the deep shadows and faces reminding of skulls. All these you will routinely find in expressionist genre scenes, and generally speaking, here is an advice on how to tell an expressionist paintings from any other work of art: when you look at it you fel as if watching a condemned prisoner enjoy his last meal.