Die Brücke
The group of artists known as "Die Brücke" [The Bridge] was co-founded in Dresden on 7 June 1905 by four architecture students: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In 1906 they were joined by the painters Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, in 1908 by Kees van Dongen and in 1910 by Otto Mueller. A year later the Czech painter Bohumil Kubišta also joined Die Brücke. Die Brücke was one of the earliest groups of German artists' to exert a formative influence on modern 20th-century art. In their paintings, prints and sculpture the Brücke artists sought to find new ways of artistic expression and to detach themselves from traditional academic art. The new style the artists developed jointly is a form of Expressionism. The main themes and genres addressed by the Brücke artists in their work are landscape, the nude in nature and in free movement. These motifs became the vehicles for expressing these artists' subjective states of mind, emotions and inner experience of the world. This heightening of expression is achieved by reduction of forms to essentials. Traditional linear perspective and academic proportions were abandoned. Intensive study of the art of non-European indigenous peoples was an important source of inspiration. In the Expressionist art of "Die Brücke", color and form strove for pure expression. color soon ceased to be modelled after nature, becoming the sole vehicle for expressing emotion. Vibrant colors were applied in impulsively spontaneous gestural brushwork. The Brücke artists deserve particular credit for including printmaking in their Expressionist overall approach; they were the ones who revived the woodcut and worked out new possibilities for expression through it. The Brücke group moved to Berlin in 1911 but by 1913 the group was disbanded there. The reasons for this were the manifold influences of the big city, the different ways in which the various artists developed and disputed among them. There has been a Brücke Museum in Berlin since 1967.
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Pechstein
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Lithograph 1919
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Schmidt-
Rottluff
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Woodcut 1921
Starting bid: 280 EUR
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