While the word expressionist was used in the modern sense as early as 1850, its origin is sometimes traced to paintings exhibited in 1901 in Paris by an obscure artist Julien-Auguste Hervé, which he called Expressionismes. Though an alternate view is that the term was coined by the Czech art historian Antonin Matějček in 1910, as the opposite of impressionism: "An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures. Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols."
Important precursors of Expressionism were: the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), especially his philosophical novel Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-92); the later plays of the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849-1912), including the trilogy To Damascus 1898-1901, A Dream Play (1902), The Ghost Sonata (1907); Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), especially the "Lulu" plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) (1904); the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-92): Leaves of Grass (1855-91); the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81); Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1864-1918); Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-90); Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1949); Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, formed Die Brücke (the Bridge) in the city of Dresden. This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from Wassily Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903. Among their members were Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Auguste Macke. However, the term Expressionism did not firmly establish itself until 1913. Though initially mainly a German artistic movement,  most predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910-30, most precursors of the movement were not German. Furthermore there have been expressionist writers of prose fiction, as well as non-German speaking expressionist writers, and, while the movement had declined in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were subsequent expressionist works.
 

 

Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with other major 'isms' of the modernist period: with Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism and Dada." Richard Murphy also comments: "the search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging expressionists such as Kafka, [Gottfried] Benn and Döblin were simultaneous the most vociferous "anti-expressionists."