Die Brucke

Die Brucke, The Bridge, was a group of German Expressionist artists founded in Dresden in 1905 by architecture students Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who took the name from a passage in Nietzsche describing humanity as a bridge to something beyond itself. Reacting against academic naturalism and bourgeois convention, the group developed a raw, jagged style of angular figures, harsh unnatural color and crude woodcut technique revived from German medieval prints, depicting urban street life, nudes and Berlin's nightlife with deliberate rawness meant to shock complacent taste. The group relocated to Berlin in 1911, where its style grew more agitated and nervous in response to the city, and dissolved in 1913 after internal disputes, but its jagged, expressive vocabulary became foundational to German Expressionism as a whole.