This twentieth century art movement is dedicated to the expression of emotion and "being alive" rather than representations of physical reality.  It began in Germany where Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 argued that all of art encompasses the emotional Dionysian dynamic as well as the ordered Apollonian dynamic. 

Germany artists before World War I were inspired by Munch's The Scream of 1893 and began producing works in 1912 in Munich and Dresden.  They were influenced by the Fauves in Paris and Expressionist works flourished in the years of the Weimar Republic.  National Socialism did not favor expressionist artists and there was an exodus of them to Britain and New York as World War II approached. 

During and after World War II Expressionism works gained increasingly greater acceptance in America and Britain.  In the latter starting in the 1930's Francis Bacon was a leading producer of Expressionist works.  In sculpture one of the masterpieces of the genre is Hercules the Archer of 1909 by Emile Antoine Bourdelle.