Expressionism is a way of making art — painting, writing, theatre, film, music — where the artist puts inner feeling on the outside, instead of copying how things look in ordinary light. Faces may be twisted, colours too strong, streets bent, because the point is the feeling, not a photograph of the world. It is a school-and-museum word, strongest in talk about early twentieth-century art. Students often meet it next to impressionism, which is almost the opposite mood: light and the eye, not the cry inside. An expressionist work is one in that style. People stretch the label in casual talk for any loud, feeling-first style, even when art historians would not agree.