Kunstenaars van Die Brücke

Bridge from Old to New

With an anti-bourgeois and anti-academic stance, the artists of the group Die Brücke (The Bridge) began their resistance to the established order and academic traditions in the visual arts in 1905. Together, they sought a new, authentic visual language and drew inspiration from their personal emotional lives, non-Western art, and spontaneous expression. This made them important pioneers of Expressionism, which shook up the European art world at the beginning of the twentieth century. Forms were simplified, colors were determined by an inner urge for expression, and the depiction of spaces seemed arbitrary. The name “Die Brücke” (the bridge) was coined by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and likely derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885), in which the bridge symbolized a transition between old and new—tradition and future.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Artists Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt Rottluff were associated with Die Brücke for varying periods of time, primarily active in and around Dresden and Berlin. In the summer, they exchanged the city for the coast and the countryside. This is reflected in their work: in addition to countless female portraits and nudes, modeled for by their friends, they also regularly painted the idyllic countryside. The central figure in the group was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who captured the group’s manifesto in a woodcut in 1906. The artists worked together as a group for several years. In 1913, the need for individual development became so great that Die Brücke was disbanded.

Expressionism

This exhibition featuring six prominent artists from Die Brücke features a selection from the collection of the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany. The works showcase the expressiveness, spontaneity, and themes shared by the artists of Die Brücke. They paint in an expressionist visual language that spread across Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, including Bergen. The avant-garde artists who settled there at the turn of the century embraced it.

“Artists of Die Brücke” is a collaboration between the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (Germany) and Museum Kranenburgh.

The exhibition is made possible in part by an indemnity guarantee from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands on behalf of the Minister of Education, Culture and Science.