Brücke, Die

Brücke, Die (The Bridge). Group of German Expressionist artists founded in Dresden in 1905 and disbanded in Berlin in 1913 (its full name was ‘Die Künstlergruppe Brücke'—‘The Artists' Group of the Bridge'). The founders were four architecture students at the Dresden Technical School: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The name was suggested by Schmidt-Rottluff, because of their admiration for the philosopher Nietzsche, who in Also sprach Zarathustra wrote that ‘What is great about man is that he is a bridge and not a goal'; it indicated their faith in a happier, more creative future, to which their own work would act as a bridge. Kirchner—at 25 the oldest of the group and the only one to have had any professional training as a painter—was the dominant figure; it was he who wrote the group's short manifesto (1906) and cut it in wood so it could be issued as a broadside. It reads: ‘With a belief in progress and in a new generation of creators and supporters, we summon all youth together. As youth we carry the future and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and movement in opposition to the well-established older forces. Everybody belongs to our cause who reproduces directly and passionately whatever urges him to create.’ This document typifies the vagueness of their aims, for no clear programme emerged from any of their publications; however, in essence they were in revolt against passionless middle-class conventions and wished to create a radically new style of painting that would be in tune with modern life.

The Brücke artists often worked in close collaboration, although they never lived together as a community. Initially they rarely signed their work, and one member would sometimes use a print by one of the others as a basis for a painting. This group solidarity and interchange of ideas meant that critics sometimes had difficulty telling one member's work from another's. Their subjects were mainly landscapes and figure compositions (a favourite theme being nudes in the open air); they were treated in an emotional style characterized by strong (and often unnaturalistic) colour and simplified, energetic, angular forms. Although there is some kinship of spirit with Fauvism (founded in the same year), notably in the bold colour and sense of spontaneity, the work of the Brücke artists was markedly different in feeling and technique: in place of exuberance there was restlessness and anxiety, and in place of French sophistication there was the crude vigour of artists who had had almost no formal tuition as painters. They were influenced not only by late medieval German art, which is often extremely intense emotionally, but also by primitive art, of which the Museum of Ethnology in Dresden had a substantial collection, acquired from German colonies in Africa and Oceania.

The Brücke artists promoted their work by more than twenty exhibitions; the first was held in the Seifert Lamp Factory in Dresden in October 1906, but later ones were usually in more traditional gallery spaces. Exhibitions that consisted only of graphic art generally travelled to several venues. They attached great importance to printmaking and played a major role in the revival of the woodcut that was such a feature of early 20th-century graphic art. Like their paintings, their prints often had a harsh, untutored intensity, with the forms sometimes almost hacked into the block. The prints were sold not only at exhibitions, but also by means of annual portfolios, issued to subscribers (or ‘honorary members'), of whom there were 68 in 1910 (they all came from German-speaking countries, apart from a Miss Edith Buckley of Crawley, Sussex, about whom unfortunately nothing is known). By this time the original membership of Die Brücke had changed. Bleyl had dropped out in 1909 and several other artists had joined, although some of them were really ‘corresponding members’ whose contributions were marginal. The most committed recruits were Max Pechstein, who joined in 1906, and Otto Müller, who joined in 1911. Emil Nolde also took up an invitation to join in 1906 (surprisingly, given the fact that he was a loner by instinct), but he left the following year. Four foreign artists whose work was admired by the founders also became members, but they had nothing in common with the Germans stylistically: they were the Swiss Cuno Amiet, the Dutch-born, French-resident Kees van Dongen, the Finn Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and the Czech Bohumil Kubišta.

By 1911 all the German members of Die Brücke had moved to Berlin, where there was a more vigorous cultural scene (the group had made an impact at the first exhibition of the Neue Sezession there in 1910). Pictures showing the stress of urban life now became increasingly important in their work, often conveying a nightmarish sense of claustrophobia and depravity. They were now beginning to achieve national recognition, but they were also losing their group identity as their individual styles emerged more clearly. In 1912 Pechstein was dismissed for exhibiting outside the group, and other personal differences emerged. To try to reaffirm their cohesion, the remaining members decided to publish a Chronicle of their activities, written by Kirchner. It had the opposite effect from the one intended, for the other members objected to certain of Kirchner's statements and the association was dissolved by mutual agreement in 1913. A museum of the group's work opened in Berlin in 1967, funded by Schmidt-Rottluff.

George Heard Hamilton writes of the Brücke artists: ‘Their association did not last long, but it was remarkable for the intensity of their convictions, for their intellectual and technical cooperation, and for the insight with which, as critics of society, they exposed its moral decline … They had created Germany's first modern movement with works, morbid and displeasing as at times they may be, that are often of authentic and indisputable force.’