Die Brücke

About

Four architecture students in Dresden, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, founded Die Brücke ('The Bridge') in 1905. They wanted an art of immediacy, free of academic rules. They shared studios, drew nude models in quick quarter-hour poses and spent summers at the Moritzburg lakes painting bathers outdoors.

The style is easy to spot. Colour is flat, loud and unnatural; outlines are jagged; bodies are simplified in ways partly drawn from African and Oceanic carvings in Dresden's ethnographic museum. Woodcut was central, cut boldly so that the gouges and grain show. Max Pechstein joined in 1906, Emil Nolde belonged briefly around the same time, and Otto Mueller joined in 1910. After moving to Berlin around 1911, Kirchner turned to the city itself, as in Street, Berlin (1913), with its sharp-edged, mask-faced walkers. A dispute over Kirchner's written chronicle of the group ended it in 1913.