Impressionists get all the love. Who doesn't adore light, confections of surface, sparkling many-flagged regattas, a face turned just so into the sun? A triad of small shows, temporarily mounted in the Honolulu Academy of Arts' contemporary gallery, attempts to spread the love to Impressionism's less-favored but darkly brilliant half-sibling, Expressionism.

It's always been true, long before modern art-historical "isms" became lingo, that there are painters of light and painters of shadow — the difference, say, between the sun-saturated Italian Southern Renaissance, its luscious Venuses and Medici gardens, and the dreary North's more somber Brueghels and Boschs: hubris-bound Icarus plunging from sky to ocean, hell's fallen gardens, Rembrandt's face dissolving into bone-black pigment.

Expressionism, in this context, has been somewhat modernism's dark horse. And in the post-Pollock years since painting was last declared dead, circa 1968, in clever and ironic and conceptual pre-New-Sincerity contemporary art, it's been the horse often put out to pasture.

Yet it's no accident that expressionistic tendencies run a deep vein through art history. Call it yin and yang, dialectic, the good the bad and the ugly (usually with the bad and ugly as bedfellows), whatever — but all that light needs a seasoned chiaroscuro to set it off. After all, where would Luke be without his dark daddy, Darth? Living a quiet life of desperation in the galactic desert, no doubt, watching late-night infomercials on QVC. Hardly the stuff of myth.

That's why it's refreshing to see the academy open its Western storage drawers to explore the force's darker side. They've paired late 19th- and early 20th-century German Expressionist prints and drawings from their collection, arranged in an intimate corridor, with an open-roomed constellation of monumental canvases that gravitate around latter-day Neo-Expressionism and new Social Realism. The juxtaposition suggests these "neos" may share more emotional territory with early predecessors (or post-WWII European Existentialists) than with mid-century Abstract Expressionists.

This canny match-up also upstages the academy's own annual "Artists of Hawai'i" exhibition, on view in the next gallery, which this year skews forgettably toward airy abstractions and black-and-white photographs. It's simply a relief, perhaps, to see a roomful of art that predicates itself on history's bones and raw gristle, rather than its smooth, media-slick surface.

The early German Expressionist works yield multiple delights: lyrical, forgotten passages by top-shelf artists, such as the remarkable K¬athe Kollwitz, whose offerings include a woodcut self-portrait and a sublime etching from her early-1900s "Peasant's War Cycle." Her post-denouement battlefield scene's velvety ground pitches us into the miserable black heart of human foibles, presaging thematics by later modernists such as Lee Bontecou, whose fierce 1960s welded-steel-and-canvas, wire-stitched constructions, as shown here, invoke war's metaphysical wounds and sutures.

Also noteworthy are Max Beckman's cunning self-portraits; their unseemly air connects loosely through time to Leon Golub's grotesque figurations, represented here by a raw canvas from his 1980s "Horsing Around" series. Paul Klee's graphic, hand-colored 1921 woodcut nods to Picasso's collage aesthetic and splintered Cubistic spatial planes, inspired by African masks and the rather racist supposition of "primitive" art's emotional primacy.

Visitors can cross-reference Emil Nolde's 1907 lithograph "Head of a Man," whose subject's hair seeps downward darkly toward hollowed eyes and mouth, with the deep facial cavities in Chinese New Wave artist Yan Pei Ming's 1997 "Portrait of Iz." (Yes, that's Hawai'i's beloved soul Bruddah, captured just before his death.) Ming's broad gestural brush strokes, black slabs swirled with white, glisten like existential sweat under stage lights. The musician's portrait doubles as morbid premonition: hard work to sing, to pump blood.

Then there are those canvases by the promising, Leipzig-based Neo Rauch (whose current show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is grabbing lukewarm reviews) and Hawai'i's Masami Teraoka. Both artists are visionaries who conflate art and cultural histories, spiraling them into incendiary, ritualistic, tragi-mythic vortexes; institutional critique is touched with compassion for a shared, human-scale blindness. Mammoth, emotionally messy, pastiche-driven and fallible, these canvases are indelibly haunting, in the way of dreams or stuttering classic film sequences.

The show also lets loose several modernist hiccups: sleek, small-scale affairs by Ab-Ex sculptors David Smith and Mark di Suvero, and a sideline show spotlight on abstract kinetic artist Alexander Calder — minor studies in the oeuvres of major players, whose names were made not via the miniature, as shown here, but via the monumental.

A finned, finish-fetish sculpture by John Battenberg fuses the German militarized iron cross motif with the anti-Vietnam counterculture sentiment of California's 1960s art-and-surf scene, but still seems the odd man out. Even more so, the academy's Nam June Paik schoolhouse video installation, overplayed in this gallery throughout the past decade, isn't particularly edified by its new context.

The sculptural works are tasty, though, for sure — just not the main course that Rauch and Teraoka and Kollwitz serve up, biscuits-and-gravy soul food that sticks someplace deeper than light penetrates. These expressives seem to say there's humanity behind even Darth's death mask; get a glimpse of it before the academy cycles in a new show come December.

Marie Carvalho is a freelance writer who covers art and literature.