Museumsportal Berlin

The museum is devoted exclusively to the group of artists called "Brücke". The group was founded in 1905 in Dresden by four students: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel. It is the oldest group of German artists to have a decisive impact on the development of 20th century art. Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde joined in 1906 and Otto Mueller in 1910. The "Brücke"´s pictorial language and critical attitude towards traditional academic painting fostered a movement, later called Expressionism. This movement, aside from its artistic achievements also came to express a new awareness of life and freedom from rules and oppression by bourgeois society. It was soon endorsed by poets, writers and composers.

Expressionism sought to be a pure expression of colour and form. Nature is visible in the paintings of the "Brücke" and becomes the vehicle for a condition, an inner emotion. The purpose of the artist is not to create an image of objects but to convey an internal concept: visible reality is transformed, reduced to what is essential and colour undergoes a process of abstraction. This approach is applied wildly in bold planes and breaks free from the natural colours of the object, thus acquiring independent value. "Brücke"; Expressionism was not confined to painting, it also appears in drawings and the graphic arts.

The Brücke-Museum in Berlin, whose collection is entirely devoted to the works of the "Brücke" artists, demonstrates the birth of modernism in a unique fashion. The museum was opened to the public in 1967. The core of the collection was a generous donation by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to the city of Berlin; Erich Heckel also supported the museum with extensive donations. The collection then was systematically enlarged by subsequent acquisitions. Today the Brücke-Museum owns around 400 paintings and sculptures as well as several thousand drawings, watercolours and prints from all creative periods of the "Brücke" artists.