1. AND THE BIRTH OF EXPRESSIONISM
DIE BRUCKE
AND THE BIRTH OF EXPRESSIONISM

2. GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM
The term Expressionism was probably first used in the way we understand it today.
Expressionist artists, many of whom worked in Germany where we imagine the
movement originated.
Expressionist artists wanted to create art that confronted the viewer with an intense,
direct and personal depiction of the artist’s state of mind.
We know that it comprised of certain core elements:
-linear distortion/ a reappraisal of the concept of beauty/
radical simplification of detail and bold colouration.
Expressionist artists achieved a heightened sense of urgency through the use of
non naturalistic colour and exaggerated, elongated forms.

3. The Expressionist Movement was associated predominantly with 2 groups of artists,
one based in Dresden and the other in Munich- having many goals and influences
in common.
The artists wanted to distinguish themselves from the bourgeois urban society in
which many had grown up in. Some of the artists lived communally in rural areas,
where they developed a fascination for ‘primitive societies’ and collected and
imitated German Folk art in an effort to rekindle art’s vital force.
They were influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, who had worked in the Pacific
Islands and had abandoned the use of realistic colours and often rendered his scenes
as simple, flattened forms.

4. They were also looking back to the art of the German Renaissance-
Albrecht Durer (15thC) and of course, Mathis Grunewald (c15th).

5. In the early 1900s, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner(1880-1938) an architect student from
Dresden who was studying in Munich, visited an exhibition of contemporary
German artists. He was deeply disappointed and described what he saw
as “anaemic, bloodless and lifeless daubs”, adding that, “ it was quite obvious
that the public was bored”.
It helped him to take action, and back in Dresden in 1905, he formed an artists group
with 3 fellow students who shared his love of painting- Erich Heckel,
Karl Schmidt- Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl.
On Schmidt-Rottluff’s suggestion they called themselves ‘Die Brucke’...The Bridge,
echoing Neitszche’s notion that life for mankind was not an end in itself but a
bridge to a better future.

6. Like The Fauves, the Die Brucke attributed little importance to design, which they
simplified and reduced to its essential elements, and put all their efforts instead
into the communicative power of colours, sharply contrasting and packed with an
intense, almost violent light.
Like the Impressionists they sought to portray real life and nature in all its
forms; but while the vision of the Impressionists was reassuring and untroubled,
basically optimistic about life, the members of Die Brucke were restless, tormented,
distressed. They did not share the ethics and values of the middle class, did not believe
in positive optimism, nor in the illusion of a world of continuous progress thanks to
the discoveries of science and technology.
Instead they affirmed the subjective and the irrational values of art.

7. Instead they affirmed the subjective and
the irrational values of art.
They were convinced that human life was
characterised by its emotional dimension
and that the role of the artist was to
express in images what could not be
understood by means of concepts or words.

8. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
“Nude” 1909

9. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
“Franzi in Front of a Carved Chair”
1910

10. Kirchner
“Berlin Street Scene” 1913

11. Kirchner
“Self Portrait as a Soldier” 1915

12. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
“Rosa Schapire” 1911

13. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
“Girl at the Mirror” 1915

14. Emil Nolde
“Crucifixion” 1911