Die Brucke: The Artists

Kirchner / Schmidt‐Rotluff/ Heckel/ 

Nolde

Die Brucke What is it?• Most of Die Brücke were untrained in art, but the harsh colours and distorted shapes in their work successfully expressed their strong feelings and vivid imaginations.

• The group moved to Berlin in 

1910 and disbanded in 

controversy in 1913. 

Die Brucke What is it?

• Group of German expressionists, founded in Dresden 1905, whose work marked the beginning of modern art in Germany.

• Name indicated their faith in the Art of the Future –which they saw their own work was to serve as a bridge towards.

• The principal members were the architectural student Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, in whose studio they regularly gathered, and his friends Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt‐Rottluff, and, later, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein. 

• Rejecting academic tradition, realism, and impressionism, they drew inspiration from German medieval and Renaissance art, Art Nouveau, Primitive art, and the French Post‐impressionists Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Fauvists’.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880‐1938)

• In 1905, he formed Die Brücke group along with fellow architecture students. He was a young man with a strong sense of a mission.

• Kirchner was considered the group's leader and he recruited Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde to join the movement in 1906. 

• Kirchner who introduced the group to Primitivism.• During World War I, Kirchner struggled with 

alcoholism and he was discharged from the army in 1915.

• Over the next few years, he was in and out of institutions. His chronic insomnia led to dependence on drugs and alcohol which intensified his severe emotional and physiological problems.

Nude Dancers,1909.

Woodcut

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Erich Heckel and Dodo, 1909

Black crayon on paper

Kirchner, Woman with a Japanese Parasol (1909)

Kirchner Three bathers 1913

KirchnerTwo Nudes, 1907

Kirchner Bathers at Moritzburg 1909

Nudes in Landscape

• By painting nudes, especially in the open air, Kirchner was trying to approach his ideal of a life that was free from the bourgeois moral inhibitions and in harmony with nature  similar to Gauguin's work from the South Pacific.• This idea also ties into Kirchner’s interest in Nietzche’s ideas about an original and pristine Being, uncorrupted by civilisation.• At this time in Germany there had also been a sort of nudist cult (1890s) which was anti‐bourgeois, anti‐urban, and tied to the nationalistic German youth movement (post‐1904) and Dresden had 11 established areas practicing.• The brushwork has an air of freedom about it and the colours are carried throughout the work from the way the bodies are painted to the way that nature is painted  Kirchner is trying to show a close relationship between man and nature.

Kirchener, Bareback Rider, 1912

Changes in Subject MatterIn 1911 Kirchner moves to Berlin and turn his attention to life in the city as one of his major artistic themes. Some subject matter includes:

• city scenes

• prostitutes

• the circus

• dance

The circus, held an affinity for Kirchner, he felt that the performers were no different that artists, selling their souls to win the favour and money of the bourgeois. It was felt by Die Brucke artists that the circus and danse halls expressed the vibrancy and dynamism of life within the restrictions of the city.

Kirchner, Five women in the street, 1913. Oil on canvas.

Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913. Oil on canvas

The City and the Streets• Kirchner’s move to Berlin had an enormous impact on the artist, his work become much more psychologically driven and his art is an outlet for this. This is reinforced by Freud’s ideas that “Art is a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions…”

• Kirchner had a love-hate relationship with the city. On one hand he wanted to shake the German bourgeoisie (who had become ‘fattened’ by the industry revolution of the 1870s) and present them with the realities of the city ie. prostitution, motor vehicles, hustle and bustle. On the other hand he wanted to celebrate the efforts and energy of those exploited by the bourgeoisie.

• His street scenes show much more angularity that before (influence of Gothic art, woodcut prints, and Grunewald’s style) along with a new colour palette that abandons the Fauvist vibrancy in place of a darker palette.

• Sickly colour used to show the sickness that the city imbues. The prostitues’ high fashion is embellished, the feathers reminiscent of birds-of-prey.

• The modern city is shown with each work (use of the automobile as a symbol of modernisation).

• The women seem to have an air of aloofness and attitude of disinterest, which was is was an allusion of the laws of the time that banned prostitution.

Kirchner, The Drinker (self-portrait), 1915. Oil on canvas.

The DrinkerSubject: a self‐portrait of the artist after he had been called up to military duty, and after 

he suffered his nervous breakdown. He paints the metropolitan psyche here as a lost soul in a state of regression or devolution.

Context: Germany in the years during and surrounding WWI was not a place of joyful and frivolous atmosphere. Kirchner, anxious to be inducted, drown his worries in absinthe (about a litre a day), the glass seen on the table.

• The artist/drinker is confronted by his own limitations “The heaviest burden of all is the pressur of the war and the increasing superficiality.”

Style: Curves are eliminated by sharply acute angles and slashing diagonal lines.

• An edgy, congested scene that puts you on emotional edge. The space splinters, zigzags, and implodes on the individual. 

• Exaggerated use of colour, contrasts red and blue tones.

Iconography: the glass of absinthe as a sign of his self‐destruction, heightened by the evil green colour.

• The face is mask like; the body almost disappears under the coat, and the scarf wraps itself around his neck in a menacing way. The figure seems to suffer inertia, incapable of action.

Kirchner's Self-Portrait as Soldier (1915)

Self-Portrait as Soldier

• Similar to The Drinker, Kirchner shows a tormented artists/individual who is incapable of dealing with the world that has been forced upon him.

• He paints himself in uniform, symbolic of his service in the war, the severed hand is thought to be significant of his inability to approach his art, the naked woman whom he has his back turned, which alludes to the former life that he once embraced.

• Kirchner said, “I stagger to work but all my work is in vain and the mediocre is tearing everything down in its onslaught. I’m now like the whores I used to paint. Washed out…I keep on trying to get some order in my thoughts and to create a picture of the age out of the confusion, which is after all my function.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,Peter Schlemihl: Conflict,

1915, Woodcut.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,Head of a Sick Man (Self-portrait),1918, woodcut,

What was special about the Die Brucke woodcuts?

• Die Brucke revised the German tradition of woodcut as a major art form.

• Indeed the difference between the woodcuts of the Die Brucke artists and those of artists in other countries was that their revival in Germany contributed to the character of painting and sculpture.

• Kirchner wrote, “Making woodcuts, which I’d learnt from my father, helped me to simpler, stable forms.”

Style, Form, and Technique

• Woodcutting style is graphic.

• They are clearly outlined, striking, and sharp. 

• Well delineated and clearly and vividly described.

• Strong contrast of black and white.

Head of a Sick Man (Self‐portrait)

• This self‐portrait is a powerful record of his external decline and emotional state as it was executed Head of a Sick Man, in the sanatorium at Kreuzlingen in 1918.

• Delicate hatching, with short lines placed closely together, make the narrow face with its high forehead, deep‐set eyes and sunken cheeks appear frozen in the picture plane.

• The sheer number of the small cuts also introduces an element of nervous agitation.

Erich Heckel (1883-1970).

• Founding member of the Dresden based movement in 1905. His early work was strongly influenced by Van Gogh with violent use of impasto and predominant colour of red, green, and blue.

• He was the most pragmatic character of the group who took over the management and intensively engaged himself in the organisational duties within Die Brucke.

• Heckel produced his first woodcut in 1904 and subsequently went on to make over 460 woodcuts.

• Like the other “Brücke” painters he searched for nature as untouched as possible by civilization and spent the summers of 1907 and 1908 at the North Sea coast in Dangast and of 1909 and 1910 at the Moritzburger Lakes with Kirchner.

• Like Kirchner, he too joined the war and created a number of sketches and drawings of his experiences.

• In 1937, The Nazis deemed his art "Degenerate." 729 works were expelled from German museums. In January 1944, his studio was bombed and all of his blocks and

plates were destroyed.

Erich Heckel, Crouching woman, (1914), 71 x 56cm, woodcut. Heckel, Junges mädchen / 

Young Woman, (no date) woodcut

Kopf / Head of a Woman. Original woodcut, 1915.

Heckel Fränzi Reclining (1910) Woodcut

Erich Heckel, Brickworks, 1907, Oil on canvas.

Heckel, Like the other Brücke artists he searched for nature as untouched as possible by civilization. This work was done while he still lived in Dresden and shows the strong influence of Van Gogh’s brush work.

Erich Heckel, Two Men at the Table, 1912, Oil on canvas.

Two Men at the Table

• Demonstrates Heckel’s strong human sympathies, subject matter is not social or political but personal.

• It is believed to be a scene from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but was not intended to be a textual illustration.

Erich Heckel, Portrait of a Man, 1919, woodcut print.

Erich Heckel, A Glassy Day, 1913, Oil on Canvas

A Glassy Day

• Done right near the end of Die Brucke, his paintings began to change, colour isn’t being used as a means of expression, rather the stiff, fragmented / shattered form invokes a sense of oppressiveness.

• Presents a form that is stiff and generalised in the style of wooden carving.

• Facetting of Cezanne and multiple perspectives of analytic Cubism an essential element of the work.  There may also be some influence of the Italian Futurists who had their first Berlin exhibition in 1912.

• The work seems to fuse together the sky, the earth, the water and the man in one single experience.  This is done through the use of blue, which is carried throughout the art work.

Karl Schmidt‐Rotluff (1884‐1976)

• Like Heckel, his work was heavily inspired by Van Gogh; his canvases are often heavy reds and blues.

• Introspective man who preferred painting landscapes to people.

• Excelled in the woodcut. Its harsh contrasts of black and white suited his uncompromising and austere personality.

Karl Scmidt-Rotluff, Summer, 1913, Oil on canvas.

Emphasizes connectivity of humanity and nature

Summer

• Loose, often aggressive brushwork, which can be seen in the simplified landscape that the figures are a part of.

• The flatness of the figures and the outlining of the surrounding landscape reminiscent of the Fauves.

• Freedom in use of un‐naturalistic colours that are broken up by the lines throughout. 

• The nudes and nature are fused together by the use and radiance of the red.

Russische Landschaft mit Kreuzweg, 1919Russian Landscape with Crossing RoadsWoodcut, 39x49 cm, (seventh work of 1919).

Schmidt-Rottluff, Christ and Judas(1918)

Schmidt-Rottluff, Nine Woodcuts, Apostle(1918)

After the war, Schmidt-Rottluff did a series of woodcuts with that depicted the life of Christ. He became interested in transcendental reality as a means to come to terms with what he had seen during the war.

Emil Nolde (1867‐1956)

• He joined Die Brucke in 1906 brought a special, mystical dimension to the German Expressionist group that was later to be taken up  by Der Blaue Rieter. 

• His career illustrates a number of the moral dilemmas which faced German Modernists of the first generation, since his instincts were nationalist and conservative even though his art was regarded as experimental.

• In his youth Nolde read the Bible a great deal ‐ its images were to return to him later in life.

• His time with Die  Brucke was short‐lived due to Nolde’s concern with the group’s artistic pursuits.

Emil Nolde, The Last Supper, 1909.

Emil Nolde, Dance Around the Golden Calf, 1910, Oil on canvas

Emil Nolde, Crucifixion, 1912, Oil on canvas

Nolde attempts to revive religious imageryin expressionistic treatments of new testament scene.

In 1909 he tried to form a new group of young

artists as he felt that Die Brucke had failed to

become an alliance of good young artists. His

endeavour proved to be a failure and Nolde and his art work almost fell into

relative obscurity.

Emil Nolde Madonna, 1906Woodcut

The Prophet, woodcut (1912)

Emil Nolde, Child and Large Bird, 1912, Oil on canvas

Emil Nolde, Excited People, 1913, Oil on canvas

Nolde’s WorkCharacterised by the following stylistic features:• Artistic composition is done in very simple terms and refrains from 

skilful application.• Nolde’s attitude to his work similar to Van Gogh’s in his interest in 

passionate emotions and he had a respectful interest in primitive arts and was widely travelled after his time with Die Brucke.

• Used the Bible as a source of inspiration throughout his career.

Nolde’s Artistic Exchange• Although Nolde only worked with Die Brucke for a short period he 

brought to the group a style of painting that was much simpler, bolder, and almost more colourful.

• What he took away was the use of the woodcut and the lithograph as art processes.

Karl Scmidt-Rotluff, Summer,

1913, Oil on canvas.

Henri Matisse, Luxe, calm et volupte,

1904, Oil on canvas,

QUESTION EIGHT: FAUVISM AND EXPRESSIONISM

(i) Identify the stylistic differences between these two paintings.

(ii) Account for the differences between the two paintings by relating them to the differences between Fauvism and Die Brucke.