Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Erich Heckel (1883-1970). Landscape in Dresden (Landschaft bei Dresden), 1910. Oil in canvas, 66.5 x 78.5 cm (26 1/8 x 30 7/8 in.). Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie

“What is great in man is this: that he is a bridge and not an end,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1885. Two decades later, on June 7th, 1905, four young architecture students in Dresden, Germany, may have had those words in mind when they founded the artists group known as Die Brucke, or “The Bridge.” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Fritz Bleyl thus began an artistic movement that would stage more than seventy exhibitions before their disbanding in 1913, with twenty-seven happening in 1907 alone. “By joining together into a small, cohesive community with common goals, the Brucke artists hoped to stand up to [the] putatively fragmenting, debilitating effects of modern urban life,” writes Reinhold Heller in his essay “Brucke in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913” in Brucke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913, the catalogue to the current exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York City. This exhibition, the first major exhibition of the Brucke in the United States, resituates these artists at the very beginning of the modern, international art world as they reached beyond Germany’s borders and invited the likes of Norwegian Edvard Munch (unsuccessfully) to join their band. “By reaching out, whether successfully or not, to such revolutionary painters,” Heller continues, “the Brucke established a network of communication with Europe’s most progressive artists and art institutions.” Dresden, known as “Florence on the Elbe” and famous for its many bridges (one of which is captured in Erich Heckel’s Landscape in Dresden, above, from 1910), thus became the starting point for the bridge-building across borders and between individual artists that the modern art world has become today.


Erich Heckel (1883-1970). Studio Scene (Atelierszene), 1910-11. Oil on canvas, 70 x 48 cm (27 1/2 x 18 7/8 in.). Nachlass Erich Heckel, Gaienhofen.

In addition to their unsuccessful wooing of Munch, the Brucke successfully brought other artists, such as Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein into their fold. Staging group exhibitions and developing a signature style for their promotional material, the Brucke artists created a template for later artistic groups to follow. In all things, however, the Brucke set out to stand apart from the flow of contemporary, mainstream German life. They embraced “primitive” Indian, Oceanic, and African art, following in the footsteps of heroes such as Van Gogh and Gauguin and their search for primal forces untainted by modernity’s touch. This primitive approach, especially to the human figure, appears throughout their work, including Heckel’s Studio Scene (above), which also accurately depicts the everyday existence of the Brucke. For the Brucke artists, work and life were inseparable and models became friends and, sometimes, lovers. The artists even provided a “ruheraum” or “room of rest” for the models away from the labor of modeling. The German government’s crackdown on erotic images made the nude images of the Brucke artists all the more daring and avant-garde. In a musty old world suddenly thrown into an industrial age, the Brucke artists painted themselves as outlaws belonging to neither, but rather inhabitants of their own bohemian sphere of equality, fraternity, and, above all, beauty.



Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). Marzella (Fränzi), 1909-10. Oil on canvas, 76 x 60 cm (29 7/8 x 23 5/8 in.). Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
In the midst of this cultural separation, however, the Brucke longed to reconnect with what they saw as the essence of German art. Surrounded by the medieval art treasures of Dresden, the Brucke artists embraced forefathers such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Kirchner fashions himself as a modern Durer, who becomes “the German cultural hero” for the entire group, according to Christian Weikop in his essay, “Brucke and Canonical Association.” Nolde champions Grunewald as embodying “Nolde’s anti-academic, anti-Renaissance position,” Weikop writes. When Kirchner paints nude figures such as his Marzella (above, from 1909-1910), he channels Cranach’s approach to the nude. Kirchner elsewhere goes so far as to quote directly some of Cranach’s nudes, building a bridge across the centuries using the female form as building material. “Dresden offered much inspiration,” Weikop writes. “Here… Brucke found its first art historical corroboration in Cranach, [Sebald] Beham, and other German masters of the Middle Ages.” The Brucke even resurrected the quintessentially German medium of the woodcut as a way of recalling the past to get back to the future of art. When the Nazis debated on how to judge the Brucke in the days of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, Joseph Goebbels and others argued for the Germanness of the Brucke, but Hitler ultimately overruled them.


Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). Berlin Street Scene (Berliner Strassenszene), 1913-14. Oil on canvas, 121 cm x 95 cm (47 5/8 x 37 3/8 in.). Neue Galerie New York and Private Collection, New York.

Despite this German self-identification, the Brucke continually looked beyond national borders. Jill Lloyd’s “Brucke: National Identity and International Style” examines the tension between these nationalist and internationalist impulses. Dresden exhibitions of Van Gogh’s work in 1905 and Munch’s work in 1906 bring the cutting edge of art right to the Brucke’s doorstep. (The Neue Galerie’s Van Gogh and Expressionism exhibition in 2007 [my review here] covered that link extensively.) Lloyd sees the Brucke’s taking in of these influences not as “slavish dependence” but rather as “transformation[s].” Comparing the Brucke with their contemporaries, the Fauves, Lloyd writes, “Whereas the French artists worked within an established national tradition, the Germans pursued a self-conscious internationalism that went beyond the formulation of a new expressive style.” Criticism of the Brucke for not being “German” enough drove them in 1911 from Dresden to the more international city of Berlin. Berlin was the hub of the international art market at the time and provided easier access to the rest of the art world. In Berlin, Lloyd writes, the Brucke could “build more consciously on the elements of ‘Germanic’ or ‘Gothic’ style that had always co-existed with their modernism.” Kirchner’s Berlin Street Scene (above, from 1913-1914) shows how he adapted to his new, more cosmopolitan surroundings.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976). Corner of a Park (Parkecke), 1910. Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 75.5 cm (32 7/8 x 29 3/4 in.). Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

By 1911, however, the Brucke artists were beginning to grow apart. When Kirchner writes his chronicle of the movement and casts himself as the leader, Schmidt-Rottluff (whose Corner of a Park appears above, from 1910) and others take offense and finally disband in 1913. As Rose-Carol Washton Long explains in her essay, “Brucke and German Expressionism: Reception Reconsidered,” the Brucke soon drifted to the margins of art history for being not “modern” enough or not “political” enough. Only in the last twenty years, when “modernism” has been redefined as “one of the conflicting products of change in an industrial society,” Long writes, have the Brucke been rediscovered as an essential step in the progress of modern art. Brucke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913, the catalogue and exhibition, not only brings this neglected school to American shores for the first time, but also allows them to resurface from the depths of art history obscurity. Rather than being just a poor relation to Der Blaue Reiter, Die Brucke helped shape the international art world as we know it today in all its jet-setting internationalism. Able to embrace both their own national heritage and those of other civilizations, the Brucke artists set an example that artists continue to follow today, even if they don’t know where, how, or why it began. The Neue Galerie’s exhibition will answer all those questions, and more.

[Many thanks to the Neue Galerie for providing me with a review copy of Brucke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913 and for the images above from the exhibition.]

Fallen Bridges

When the Post-Impressionist work of Van Gogh and Gauguin raged across Germany in the early twentieth century, young artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner lapped up the primitivism and expressive color of those artists, helping make Germany the center for Expressionism up through the end of World War I. Born May 6, 1880, Kirchner literally copies Gauguin in works such as his Bathers at Mortizburg (above, from 1909), which lifts Gauguin’s native Tahitians and resets them in a European environment. Along with Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Erich Heckel, Kirchner founded Die Brücke or "The Bridge," which pledged to build a bridge from the past in art to the present by introducing a whole new way of expressing the soul through art. Sadly, like so much else of European culture, the Great War shattered the bridgemakers’ dream.

Kirchner volunteered for the German Army in 1914. By 1915, the stress of combat broke him psychologically and he was discharged. Kirchner’s Artillerymen (above), painted in his discharge year of 1915, shows another scene of bathers, but here in the context of men united in a struggle they themselves struggled to understand. The nakedness of the bathers, free of the uniforms that would clearly identify them as artillerymen, symbolizes the psychological nakedness Kirchner himself felt as the conflict laid his mind bare. While recovering in sanitariums in Switzerland, Kirchner found a group of aspiring artists gathering around him as their leader. The “Red-Blue” group propagated many of Kirchner’s ideas about painting and sculpture and helped expand the scope of Expressionism beyond Germany.




Kirchner’s international profile as an artist expanded between the wars. Unfortunately, when the Nazis rose to power in 1933, they labeled Kirchner, along with many others, a "degenerate artist" and banned him from many arts organizations in Germany. Kirchner’s 1928 Self-Portrait (above) shows the artist at the peak of his powers and reputation, yet still a disjointed, conflicted personality. In 1937, the Nazis removed most of Kirchner’s works from German museums, destroying many others. Kirchner himself destroyed unknown numbers of his own sculptures and paintings in his despair. As the Nazi war machine approached his home in 1938, Kirchner took his own life rather than fall into their hands. The man who dreamed of bridging the gap between Old Masters such as Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald and modern masters such as Van Gogh and Gauguin became an early victim of the mayhem that was World War II. For all the power of his works, Kirchner himself remained a sensitive soul, crushed by the violent world he tried to depict.

Bridging the Gap

Looking for a new direction in German art, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff joined forces with friends and fellow artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, and Erich Heckel to form Die Brucke in 1905. Die Brucke (or “The Bridge” in English) looked to bridge the gap between modern life and artistic expression and represented the first stirrings of Expressionism in Germany . Born on December 1, 1884, Schmidt-Rottluff in his Self-Portrait (above, from 1906) shows the strong influence of Van Gogh on him and his fellow German Expressionists, which the recent Neue Galerie exhibition and publication Van Gogh and Expressionism (which I reviewed here) examined in depth. These young artists took the lessons of Van Gogh’s art and memorable life story and followed his example in expressing their own feelings in pre-World War I Germany.

Following the example of Emil Nolde, an “honorary” member of Die Brucke, Schmidt-Rottluff revived the woodcut as a means of artistic expression. Like Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff found the crude lines of the woodcut capable of great feeling, especially in the depiction of religious subjects. In his Christ and Judas (above, from 1918), the faces of the savior and his betrayer, at the intimate moment of the betrayal with a kiss, Schmidt-Rottluff captures all the pathos of that scene. In 1918, as World War I began to come to its sad conclusion for Germany and the punitive measures of the Treaty of Versailles loomed, Schmidt-Rottluff may be commenting on the betrayal of Germany itself by those who had led the nation into war with grand promises of victory.

In the Twilight (above, from 1912) shows the influence of Edvard Munch on Schmidt-Rottluff. Amazingly, both Munch and Van Gogh found their first popular audience in Germany (Munch while alive and Van Gogh posthumously), thanks in large part to the championing of Die Brucke and like-minded artists. Although Die Brucke dissolved in 1913, its influence carried on in German art for decades, bringing the best of modern art to that culture even before the native cultures accepted it. Sadly, with the rise of the Nazis, Schmidt-Rottluff and Die Brucke fell under the banner of “Degenerate Art” and momentarily lost their place in German society and art. The same insight that allowed them to see the merits of Van Gogh and Munch so early later cost them as the Nazis swept away all art they felt was foreign and, therefore, decadent. In truth, Schmidt-Rottluff and Die Brucke represented all that was truly great about early modern German art in its versatility and endless acceptance of all methods of expression.

Nexus of Influence

Heinrich Nauen, one of the founding members of the German Expressionist group Die Brucke, was born on this date in 1880. His Schwemmereiter von Blauem Grund appears above.

Nauen studied the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and the Fauves before coming into his own style of Expressionism. He founded Die Brucke group with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and exhibited with the Berlin Secession in 1907. Alas, as with many German artists of the early 20th century, Nauen’s art suffered under the label of “Degenerate Art” by the Nazi regime and his career as an artist and a teacher of artists was cut short.

Nauen received more criticism than most Expressionists for his closeness in style to Van Gogh. As can be seen by his drawing Mother and Child above, Nauen used the same expressive line that Van Gogh did to express psychological anguish. The distortion of the faces in Nauen’s drawing equals that in many of Van Gogh’s drawings and paintings. I’ve always been fascinated in how the German Expressionists discovered artists such as Van Gogh and Edvard Munch so early on and assimilated so much of their style into their own. From an art history perspective, the German Expressionists serve as a nexus of influence, culling in so many previous styles and influencing so many after them. Even a relatively minor figure such as Nauen can captivate audiences simply by the residual effects of these influences, by the very residue of genius.