Collection: Die Brücke

Die Brücke, The Bridge, was founded in Dresden in 1905 by four architecture students from the Königliche Technische Hochschule: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976), and Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966). The group chose the name to mark the connection they intended to forge between artistic traditions and a future they saw forming. Emil Nolde (1867–1956) joined in 1906, Max Pechstein (1881–1955) the same year, and Otto Mueller (1874–1930) in 1910.

The Brücke programme combined sharp colour, figural distortion, and a return to the German woodcut tradition as a deliberate repudiation of Wilhelmine academic painting and bourgeois society. Their woodcuts, often printed on cheap paper from rough-cut blocks, became the period's most distinctive graphic language. The group operated with a two-tiered system: active artist members and passive members who received prints and exhibition benefits annually.

The group dissolved formally in 1913 over disputes prompted by Kirchner's Chronik der Brücke, the official chronicle of the movement. Its members continued to define German Expressionism through to Nolde's persecution under National Socialism in the 1930s.