The second decisive variety of expressionist art in Germany emerges from 1905 onward in Dresden with the founding of the artist group Die Brücke. It initially brings together four students of architecture – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. They are later joined by Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller, and briefly also by Emil Nolde and Kees van Dongen, who lives in Paris.
Inspired by Munch, van Gogh and Gaugin, as well as by the Fauves (Fr. ‘wild beasts’), who first go public in France in 1905, the Brücke artists develop a radical visual language characterised by swift simplifying brushwork, rough composition and the heightening of all colour values. Their most important themes are the nude and the landscape, followed by the city and its hectic modernity with their move to Berlin in 1911. The group breaks up in 1913.
