The woodcut medium was central to the Brücke from an early stage. In painting, although there were differences between individual artists’ work, the early canvases are often characterised by intense, non-naturalistic colouring and loose, broken brushwork. They reveal a lively engagement with recent art in Europe. Kirchner, Heckel and others absorbed and worked through the implications of modern international art; of French postimpressionism – Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh – and, a little later, of Matisse and Munch. These artists’ work could be seen in numerous exhibitions across Germany at the time. It was widely documented and debated in the art press and in influential books such as Julius Meier-Graefe’s monumental Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (History of the Development of Modern Art), published in 1904.

      Jugendstil, the turn-of-the-century reform movement in the decorative arts, also made an impact on the Brücke in its infancy. The sinuous contours of the Jugendstil aesthetic appear in some early Brücke prints. More fundamental principles of the movement, such as the desire to renew the arts and break down traditional barriers between the fine and applied arts, are also echoed in some of the ideals of the emerging Expressionist movement.

      Like many avant-garde artists across Europe, the Brücke discovered a new world of form, materials, imagery and symbolism in the art of non-western cultures. Their imaginative response to African and Oceanic cultures was part of the wider phenomenon of “primitivism”, often rooted in Western exoticising fantasies. But in the German Expressionist context, this was also part of a search for collective “origins”, going back to the elusive “essence” of human creativity. Many of the idealised notions of directness, instinctiveness and authenticity at the core of Expressionist ideology are related to the Brücke’s and other Expressionists’ interest in the traces of “primitive” cultures reproduced through the media of ethnography.

      In an interesting variant on the Expressionist search for “authentic” origins, Mueller was drawn to the gypsy communities of Eastern Europe, travelling to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria in the 1920s to paint and study them. He often painted his subjects using tempera on rough canvas, giving his works a “dry” and deliberately unpolished quality. Mueller seems to have felt a strong personal affinity with the gypsies he painted – his mother came from a gypsy family, but had been abandoned as a child.

      Finally, Expressionism involved a unique and complex confrontation with another powerful source; that of the German artistic past. There is an intricate connection between German Expressionism and the art of the Middle Ages. In some ways, the Expressionists’ “rediscovery” of the medieval Gothic was related to the wider primitivist project – the search for what they imagined as “pure”, authentic, vital art. For many, the art of the Middle Ages possessed a powerful integrity. Its handcraft traditions and expressive, non-naturalistic forms, resonant of profound piety, were understood as the product of an intuitive tradition.

      Emil Nolde, whose own politics tended towards the völkisch-nationalist, responded passionately to the art of so-called “primitive” peoples, or Urvölker, but, in keeping with Expressionism’s anti-academic stance, he was dismissive of art-historical orthodoxy. Ironically, the history of “great art” that he takes issue with was the legacy of a Prussian: the antiquarian and “father of art history”, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). An early draft of a book on tribal art that Nolde wanted to publish began:

      “1. ‘We see the highest art in the Greeks. In painting, Raphael is the greatest of all Masters.’ This was what every art pedagogue taught twenty or thirty years ago.

      “2. Some things have changed since then. We don’t like Raphael and the sculptures of the so-called flowering of Greek art leave us cold. Our predecessors’ ideals are no longer ours. We like less the works under which great names have stood for centuries. Sophisticated artists in the hustle and bustle of their times made art for Popes and palaces. We value and love the unassuming people who worked in their workshops, of whom we barely know anything today, for their simple and largely-hewn sculptures in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg, Bamberg”.

      In the spirit of the German Romantics of the early nineteenth century, many of the Expressionist generation felt cut off from the spiritual traditions of the past by Enlightenment rationalism. Filtered through the prism of Romanticism, the image of communal brotherhoods of anonymous craftsmen working together to build the great cathedrals of Europe awakened utopian longings for a similar sense of altruistic creative collaboration – the foundation of the Bauhaus in 1919 would also draw on the idea as a model. Cathedral-building could even be a symbol of longed-for unity. Groups such as the quasi-medieval Lukasbund (League of St Luke), better known as the Nazarenes, had formed in the early nineteenth century on the basis of similar longings, though the monastic element of that group’s creed – the Lukasbund lived a frugal, communal life devoted to art in the monastery of San Isidoro in Italy – was eschewed by many Expressionists, who generally opted for bohemian hedonism as their means to renounce bourgeois values.

      Many Expressionists wanted to revitalise not only art per se, but specifically German art. It was therefore logical that they looked to Northern European traditions for both inspiration and a sense of self-identity. Artists such as Dürer, Cranach and Grünewald were singled out as Masters of the Spätgotik (late Gothic). This categorisation emphasised their Germanic heritage and their separateness from the Italian Renaissance. For many in the early twentieth century, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, with its the harrowing image of Christ’s crucifixion epitomised the inherently expressive qualities of “German” art. Widely-read books, such as Wilhelm Worringer’s Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in Gothic) of 1912, presented an account of the Kunstwollen, or “will to art” of the German Gothic that chimed with the spirit of Expressionism. Kirchner kept a volume of Dürer’s drawings close at hand for much of his life. For artists such as Kirchner, Nolde and many others, these forefathers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exhibited qualities they sought to nurture in their own radical new work.

      In 1910, Kirchner painted Standing Nude with Hat, a work that draws directly from a sixteenth-century image. He attached enormous emotional and professional importance to the painting, regarding it as one of his most significant early works and as an image of his ideal of feminine beauty at the time. The woman is Dodo, Kirchner’s then girlfriend, who appears in many of his Dresden works. However, Kirchner was working from another, much older “model” too – the seductively smiling Venus painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1532.

      Erich Heckel, Windmill in Dangast, 1909.

      Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 80.5 cm.

      Wilhelm-Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg.

      Gabriele Münter, Jawlensky and Werefkin, 1908–1909.

      Oil on canvas, 32.7 x 44.5 cm.

      Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

      Otto Mueller, Bathers in Reeds.

      Tempera on hessian, 92 x 79 cm.

      Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

      Kirchner’s nude is less “posed”

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