Die Brücke

Die Brücke (The Bridge), also known as Künstlergruppe Brücke or KG Brücke, was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. The founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Mueller. The seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and the creation of expressionism. The group came to an end around 1913. The Brücke Museum in Berlin was named after the group.

The Brücke is sometimes compared to the roughly contemporary French group of the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitivist art and in the expressing of extreme emotion through high-keyed colors that were very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Brücke artists' emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings made their French counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison.