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The
brash, incandescent use of color combined with a youthful
willingness to tackle almost any subject matter with irreverence
helped to propel four unknown architecture students to artistic
fame in turn-of-the-century Dresden. The Brücke
(German for bridge) was formed in 1905 by Fritz Bleyl, Erich
Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who were
later joined by Herman Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller and Emile Nolde.
They found inspiration in sources as diverse as Impressionism,
Jugendstil, Oceanic, and African art. And of course, Fauvism
- the Brücke artists were all about wild color! The
group's name alluded to Dresden's many picturesque bridges over
the Elbe, and to a quote from Nietzsche: "Man is a rope,
fastened between animal and Superman . . . What is great in man is
that he is a bridge and not a goal." Their manifesto implied
forward movement, the open-ended future - sweeping aside
classicism and paving the way for something bold and modern. (And
of course, the soaring architecture of bridges have inspired other
great artists in a more literal sense - think Joseph Stella and
his famous Brooklyn Bridge.) The
Brücke artists rendered the city in chaotic frenzied street
scenes that sometimes bordered on the grotesque, distorting forms
and facial expressions with delicious and sometimes salacious
audacity. They wanted to épater la bourgeoisie, in
this case the stifling turn-of-the-century German burghers and art
world denizens. These
young Bohemians achieved their greatest effects with the daring
use of color, sometimes brightly fauvist, at others eerily
pale. They gave their human subjects pea-green,
turmeric-yellow and carmine-red skin, electric-blue overcoats and
bright lipstick-red dresses. They transformed city
landscapes and country scenes with effusive explosions of
expressionistic color. Color and emotion, color as emotion
if you will - it was the birth of German expressionism! Rottluff's
Corner of a Park (1910) has a wide, red inferno of a road
that flows upward, seemingly merging with an equally fiery sky
above. Yellows and pinks swirl about in a Van Gogh-esque
sky. The trees and grass are also consumed by an eruption of
color - everything is set in twirling, off-kilter motion. By
the time the Brücke disbanded in 1913, it had ushered in German
Expressionism and presented a raw, vibrant approach to creating
art that reflected passion and emotion rather than restraint or
refinement.
See:
Brücke:
the Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913, through
June 29, 2009 at The Neue Galerie New York, located at 1048 Fifth
Avenue
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