Guys Who Put Art in Party Animal
The original bad boys of 20th-century German art got together in June of 1905. They were nobodies: four young, restless architecture students in Dresden, the jewel of the Elbe.
Partly inspired by the city’s many bridges, they called themselves the Brücke, or bridge
in the words of their unusually open-ended manifesto. They liked echoing Nietzsche, who described man as “a rope, fastened between animal and Superman. ... a bridge and not a goal.”
By the time the Brücke disbanded, in 1913, it had revived a rawness of feeling, form and execution
The show at the Neue Galerie concentrates almost exclusively on the group’s leading, longest-serving members: Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein.
The Brücke artists were among the Peter Pans of Modernism
their dreams had not yet been trammeled by World War I
rawness co-exists with nuance and distortion with a real sense of gesture and emotion
clipped from: www.nytimes.com 
