|
Thursday, June 23, 2005
KGB in BerlinThe Neue Nationalgalerie has a fancy exhibit up this summer featuring the KGB -- a clique of young German Expressionists who got together 100 years ago to call themselves the "Kuenstlergruppe Bruecke," or "Bridge Group," apparently because they wanted to bridge the revolutionary currents flowing through Europe at the time. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Otto Mueller were all a bunch of art and architecture students in 1905 when they declared their independence from literal, heavy Wilhelminian traditions and marched down paths marked out by the post-Impressionists. The show's worth seeing; it sets the Bruecke boys in the same space as their influences (not just Art-Nouveau prints, and sketches by Van Gogh, but paintings by Gauguin and woodcarvings from New Guinea). Berlin already has a permanent Bruecke Museum, which owns the most surprising bits of this exhibit, like Kirchner's pagan stained glass and Schmidt-Rottluff's icons of the four evangelists, which were so cubist and strange, in 1912, that a Cologne church refused to hang them on the wall.
Maedchen zwischen Blattpflanzen, by Otto Mueller, 1912
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
9:43 PM
|  |
|
|
|
|
Too Much of Nothing, a novel
Politics and Prose
about our editor
The Underground Grammarian
current Berlin blog page
 |
