Boston Expressionism is an art movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that Boston Figurative Expressionism is sometimes used as an alternate term to distinguish it from abstract expressionism, with which it overlapped.

Strongly influenced by German Expressionism and by the immigrant, and often Jewish, experience, the movement originated in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1930s, continues in a third-wave form today, and flourished most markedly from the 1950s until the 1970s.

Most commonly associated with emotionality, and the bold color choices and expressive brushwork of painters central to the movement like Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine and Karl Zerbe, Boston Expressionism is also heavily associated with virtuoso technical skills and the revival of old master technique. The work of sculptor Harold Tovish, which spanned bronze, wood and synthetics is one example of the former, while the gold- and silverpoint found in some of Joyce Reopel's early work exemplify the latter.

Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine, both key figures in the movement, shared similar roots. Both grew up in immigrant communities: Bloom in the slums of Boston's West End and Levine in the South End. In the 1930s, having attended settlement house art classes as children, both won fine arts scholarships and trained at the Fogg Museum with Denman Ross. Both also drew on their Eastern European Jewish heritage, and were strongly influenced by the "starkness and angst" of German Expressionism and by then contemporary Jewish painters, such as Chagall and Soutine. Bloom tended to explore spiritual themes, while Levine was more inclined toward social commentary and dark humor, but both came to prominence in 1942 when they were included in Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States, a Museum of Modern Art exhibition curated by Dorothy Miller. Soon afterward, Time magazine called Bloom "one of the most striking of U.S. Colorists," and Levine won a prize at an exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Together, they were referred to as "the bad boys of Boston."

Another influential artist at the time was Karl Zerbe, a painter from Germany who had studied in Italy and whose early work had been condemned by the Nazis as "degenerate". Zerbe emigrated to the United States in 1934, settling in Boston where he headed the Department of Painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Zerbe helped reinvigorate the staid Boston art scene by bringing European ideas, particularly those of the German Expressionists, to Boston. He arranged for Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka, among others, to lecture at the museum school.

By the early 1950s, Bloom, Levine, and Zerbe and the artists they influenced had been dubbed the Boston Expressionists. Confusingly, they were also sometimes referred to as the Boston School, a name typically used to reference another, older, Boston-based group.

Each of these three artists had his own style, yet they shared certain tendencies. They did not paint directly from observation, but from memory and imagination; as Bernard Chaet put it, they favored "the conceptual over the perceptual". Like the Abstract Expressionists, they rejected the photographic naturalism preferred by the Nazis; and, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who had seen Bloom's work in Americans 1942, considered Bloom "the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America." Yet Bloom never embraced pure abstraction and, to varying degrees, Bloom, Levine, and Zerbe also painted figuratively, which is why their school of painting, in particular, is sometimes referred to as "Boston figurative expressionism."

The three, like the movement as a whole, were known for their technical expertise. Like the Abstract Expressionists, they were painterly, treating the paint itself, and not just its color, as a meaningful element. Known for their experimentation with new media, they were also known for their interest in methodology through the ages, thus Zerbe, for example, helped revive the ancient Egyptian medium of encaustic, a mixture of pigment and hot wax, in the 1940s.