Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
Primitive in Dresden
By Richard Dorment
Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913
an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, February 26–June 29, 2009
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Reinhold Heller
Neue Galerie/Hatje Cantz, 231 pp., $55.00
In June 1905, four very young architecture students living in the city of Dresden—Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff—founded the artists' group Die Brücke (The Bridge). Ranging in age from twenty to twenty-five, none was an artist by training. This meant that for each, the path to becoming an artist was through imitation. There is something slightly crazy but also wonderful about the way they simply lifted the bold color and wild emotionalism of Van Gogh and Gauguin and ran with them until, all passion spent, they pretty much petered out in 1913. Disliked by the right (too French), the left (too German), and—no small tribute—the Nazis (too decadent), until fairly recently their influence on art in Germany was thought to be negligible. Still, theirs was the first art to be described by the word 'expressionist,' and when the Royal Academy in London staged its magisterial survey of German art in the twentieth century, the date when modern art in Germany was deemed to have started was 1905.[1]
Review, 2203 words
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