Die Brücke

Otto Mueller

In 1905 the artists' association "Brücke" was founded by four students of architecture - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - in the city of Dresden.

Die Brucke made use of a technique that was controlled, intentionally unsophisticated and crude, developing a style hallmarked by expressive distortions and emphases. Die Brucke artists often used color similar to the Fauves, and they were also influenced by art form from Africa and Oceania.

Some of the painters in the group sympathized with the revolutionary socialism of the day and drew inspiration from Van Gogh's ideas on artists' communities. Die Brucke expressionists believed that their social criticism of the ugliness of modern life could lead to a new and better future.

The Group Members
 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Apart from their own artistic work, "Brücke" members two most important aims were to establish contact with artists of similar convictions and to introduce their anvant garde art to the public through collective exhibitions. In 1906 Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde joined the group, followed by Otto Mueller in 1910. In order to emphasize the international aims of the modernist movement, foreign artists such as Cuno Amiet, Kees Van Dongen, Axel Gallén-Kallela and others were contacted as well.

The "Brücke" style attempts the creation of pure expression through colour and form. Painted motives such as landscapes or nudes in natural settings become the symbolic expression of an inner experience of the world. Forms and shapes are reduced to their essentials and express the artist’s subjective feelings. Traditional rules of perspective and academic proportion are abandoned to heighten immediacy. In this context the artists gained important impulses from their examination of the art of indigenous peoples. Colour too was soon detached from naturalistic representation and became a means of expressing of emotion: it was applied radiantly with impulsive and spontanious brushstrokes.

   

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Artistin Marcella , 1910

Brücke-Museum, Berlin 

The founding members of Die Brücke in 1905 were four Jugendstil architecture students: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel (1883–1970),Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976). They met through the Königliche Technische Hochschule (technical university) of Dresden, where Kirchner and Bleyl began studying in 1901 and became close friends in their first term. They discussed art together and also studied nature, having a radical outlook in common. Kirchner continued studies in Munich 1903–1904, returning to Dresden in 1905 to complete his degree. The institution provided a wide range of studies in addition to architecture, such as freehand drawing, perspective drawing and the historical study of art. The name "Die Brücke" was intended to "symbolize the link, or bridge, they would form with art of the future".

Die Brücke aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and find a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge (hence the name) between the past and the present. They responded both to past artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder, as well as contemporary international avant-garde movements. The group published a broadside calledProgramme in 1906, where Kirchner wrote:

"We call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces."

Fritz Bleyl
Die Segel, 1905 

As part of the affirmation of their national heritage, they revived older media, particularly woodcut prints. The group developed a common style based on vivid color, emotional tension, violent imagery, and an influence from primitivism. After first concentrating exclusively on urban subject matter, the group ventured into southern Germany on expeditions arranged by Mueller and produced more nudes and arcadian images. They invented the printmaking technique of linocut, although they at first described them as traditionalwoodcuts, which they also made.

The group members initially "isolated" themselves in a working-class neighborhood of Dresden, aiming thereby to reject their own bourgeois backgrounds. Erich Heckel was able to obtain an empty butcher's shop on the Berlinerstrasse in Friedrichstadt for their use as a studio. Bleyl described the studio as:

"That of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist’s materials — much more like an artist’s romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student."