THE AGNST OF DIE BRUCKE
The Formation of Die Brücke
Instead of looking for inspiration from an alien tradition, such as neo-classicism, German Expressionist artists looked to their “own” artists, like Caspar David Friedrich and other Romantics. Dissatisfied with their studies, in June, 1905, four students of architecture in Dresden Polytechnic Institute formed Die Brücke or “The Bridge.” The group wanted to be a link to all those who were seeking an alternative to the prevailing art and ideas. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner became the de facto leader and his associates included Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottloff. The original four were joined in 1906 by Emil Nolde (who left group after one year), Max Pechstein, Axel Gallen, Cuno Amiet, and Kees van Dongen, who was their link with the Fauves, and Otto Muller, who joined in 1910. The Die Brücke group moved from Dresden to Berlin in 1911 and broke up in 1913 so that the artists could go their separate ways.
Die Brücke came together to exchange ideas and to break from the popular art styles, from realism to Impressionism to Jugendstil (German art nouveau). Like other young German artists, they were disciples of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch—the Northern artists, and they were influenced by the “barbaric” figures of primitive art. In their desire to go back to a more simple and a more spiritual time, the artists, like John Ruskin and William Morris used the Gothic ideals of “craft” to revive the German tradition of graphic art. Although the group is primarily known as painters, their best works were in their prints and sculptures.
Overall, their artistic aims, as evidenced from their art, were to create an abstract rather than a realist style. To this end, the Expressionists dissolved the aerial perspective of Impressionism in favor of a propped up forward leaning background. Working in what they considered a “primitive” style, the artists further blocked any illusion of depth through the use of unbroken color, which created a dynamic blocking-in of forms composed of angular and diagonal lines. Compared to Cubism, which broke form in order to investigate its properties, Expressionism retained forms and activated them to emphasize a painterly gesture as a form of expression. As Kirchner said, “…the Brücke fights for the human culture that is the foundation of true art…” “…for the Latins, beauty lies in appearances, others seek it behind things…”
Characteristics of Die Brücke painting
Like many German artists, the Die Brücke group left the city during the years 1907-1910 for painting expeditions in the countryside. Many artists formed themselves into colonies to paint in the countryside as Twentieth Century landscape painters. One of the colonies was formed in a pleasant country town outside of Munich, called Dachau. The Die Brücke painters found a bucolic scene of streams and forests in Moritzberg, which became the Argenteuil—site of Impressionist landscape paintings—of Die Brücke. Unlike Argenteuil, where people were dressed in the latest fashions, even bathing and boating costumes, the youth of Moritzberg bathed in the nude. Kirchner’s paintings of these outings in the country have an innocent air of exuberance without the taint of sexuality of decadence.
Instead there is a Nietzchean air of renewal, suggesting that the painter’s aim was to study the human body in it natural state in natural surroundings. The human body is free, a paramount concern, not just of the artists but also of the young people, who are in revolt against the authoritarian German family structure. Far from being merely an objective study of human body in action, the many escapist pictures of Die Brücke were part of revolt against urban restrictions and the confinement of the body and spirit in Prussian system.
While Die Brücke paintings may seem similar to Fauvism—the absorption of the figure in nature—there is no suggestion of Arcadia or a lost Golden Age. Instead the shouting colors that are pure are an expression of their exuberant concept of nature by means of absolute color. The early works from Dresden emphasized contour in the fashion of Gothic lines and the jagged forms were retained in the Berlin period of 1911-1913. The group left the old and beautiful Baroque city of Dresden and its Friedrich landscapes to find their fortunes in a modern city. In Berlin, the art of Kirchner changes to city subjects and the mood and tenor of his art becomes quite different.
On one hand there is the impression of a young man out of his depth in a sophisticated and fast-paced urban environment. The sharp forms and harsh colors and the fragmentation of the compressed space convey feelings of angst, anguish, and claustrophobia. On the other hand, the youthful exuberance is gone and feeling of sexual tension and gender conflicts emerged. The brittle lines become barely controlled network of angular tensions, suited to the spectacle of city life, evoking the jungle-like character of city in its last year before the Kaiser would initiate the Great War.
Characteristics of Die Brücke sculpture
Sculpture in the first half of the Twentieth Century would be increasingly neglected in favor of painting. There were several reasons for the comparable decline of three-dimensional art. First, in the face of many more international exhibitions, painting was simply cheaper and easier to transport. Second, most sculpture would have been public commissions, which were notoriously conservative. Therefore the incentives to experiment with sculpture, which was often of expensive materials, were very low. That said, Die Brücke artists took up the wood carving technique from Northern Gothic artists. Inspired by African and Oceanic art seen in Volkerkunde-Museum in Dresden, they carved near life sized figures with a frontal iconic quality .
The simplified forms were awkward and crudely carved, evoking the uncertain inner experience of humanity. Just as Gothic art was filled with spiritual longing, these statues were of—not a spiritual experience but expressed the human image and human psychology. Primitivism or a yearning for a more simple time was a utopian ideal. The works were polychromed in bold colors. Roughly outlined and hewn from found wood, these sculptures showed an interest in the inherent properties of materials, ideas inherited from Ruskin and Morris. Aside from the respect for power of non-western art on the part of the Die Brücke, the sculptures, like the paintings, attempted to convey the spiritual and psychological themes appropriate to uneasy modern times: gesture over restraint, an excess of feeling spilling out of unconventional forms that combined pure energy with the monumental. The block-like images were distorted and intensely modern, insistently of their own time. The sculptures confront the viewer with their humanity, echoing still, a century later.
Cubism is a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European paintingand sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.
Historians have sought to analyze the history of cubism in terms of phases. In one scheme, a first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. In a second phase,Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his seminal book, The Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was "Early Cubism", (from 1906 to 1908) when the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called "High Cubism", (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to "Late Cubism" (from 1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.[1]
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