[From English express: to represent something (especially a thought or feeling) in words or images; derived from Latin expressare: to press out.]
(aesthetics) A school of modernism holding that the function of art is to provide a vehicle for the subjective experience or emotional expressions of the artist. Expressionist art could be either representational (as in Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream") or abstract (as in the work of painters such as Jackson Pollock and in critical theories such as those of Clement Greenberg).