An Association of Free Artists

Narrator: Realising that the renewal of art they so desired could only be achieved in a collective effort, four architecture students named Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt joined together on 7 June 1905 to form an association of free artists.

The bonds of community between these four Brücke founders were forged in spring 1904. Kirchner and Bleyl, close friends who had studied at the Technical University in Dresden since 1901, initially began meeting “day after day” to pursue their shared enthusiasm for drawing and painting in the studio and outdoors.
 
Heckel, who began studying architecture in Dresden in spring 1904, was introduced to Kirchner and Bleyl by his brother, who had been at school with Kirchner. Heckel joined them with his friend Karl Schmidt from his schooldays in Chemnitz. Schmidt, who was from Rottluff (now part of Chemnitz) and would later be known as Schmidt-Rottluff, first worked with the others during a brief visit to Dresden in spring 1904. After matriculating at the Technical University in Dresden in summer semester 1905, he became a firm member of the circle that shortly afterwards founded Brücke.

Heckel and Schmidt(-Rottluff) had already worked together when they were at school in Chemnitz, where they both belonged to a school club called Vulkan, an institution at grammar schools in the city where students could their foster their interests in literature, philosophy, and the fine arts. The four shared a hunger for a new quality of artistic expression and a belief that this called for direct experience and spontaneous depiction. In their student dwellings (called Buden in German) in Dresden, and later in their studios and outdoor surroundings, they practiced rapid drawing – a distinctive technique fostered by the founders of Brücke to permit intuitive creation based on immediate experience of the motif.
 
During these gatherings, the idea of setting up a group took shape. The aim was not merely to work together; these ambitious young artists were eager to go public. To be successful as artists, to be able to work and live freely and independently, they would have to participate in exhibitions. Their work had to be sold and collectors won over.
 
Heckel recalls, “Each of us on our own would have found it far harder to have the chance to exhibit than several of us together.” It probably mattered less to them that as individuals they did “not have enough paintings to fill the rooms” than that “art dealers usually baulked at solo exhibitions with so far unknown artists . . . as nobody knew yet what we had painted.”
 
Kirchner’s suggestion “to give it a try with an association” met with an enthusiastic response from the others. “Of course we thought about how to approach the public,” recounts Heckel. “Schmidt-Rottluff said we could call it ‘Bridge’, as that was a word with many connotations, did not represent a programme, but in a sense led from one shore to the other”. The symbolism of this conscious choice of name reflects the artists’ desire for a new departure; by putting the old behind them and formulating a new kind of art, they were subtly, but not without aplomb, attributing a key role in this process to themselves.