Brucke Show at Neue Gallerie
Well, if any of you read my blog consistently, you’ll know that the Neue Gallerie is one of my favorite spots in all of New York City. It is such a charming, small space with some killer art. It feels more like a gallery or a person’s home than it does a major museum - and yet is has some of the best Eastern European art in the world. Well, Roberta Smith wrote a review about their latest show. I wanted to share it with you all with the hope that you’ll go visit the museum and see the show. Both are incredible:
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.
The Brücke, at the Neue Galerie, includes the oil painting “Fränzi in Front of Carved Chair,” by this German art movement’s leader, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Partly inspired by the city’s many bridges, they called themselves the Brücke, or bridge. They felt it implied movement toward the future and away from the “older, well-established powers,” 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 that had been largely absent from European art since early medieval times. It had made a place for itself in the Modernist repertory, the creed of Expressionism, an art made directly from, by and for the self, unrestrained by affectations of polish, reason or classical beauty.
3 years ago | Tags: artist, German expressionism, art Neue Gallerie
