GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM MAPS
German Empire
Weimar Republic
German Empire
1871–1918
Established in 1871 through the unification of numerous
German territorial states, the largest of which was Prussia.
Murnau
Vasily Kandinsky
(1909)
In 1908 Kandinsky enjoyed frequenting Murnau, a picturesque Bavarian village where he embraced brilliant, fluid color that, to him, seemed to render recognizable subject matter superfluous.
Berlin
Max Klinger
1881 (print executed 1880)
Klinger set his tale of sexual desire and loss at one of Berlin's popular new sites for leisure and entertainment, the Central Skating Rink.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1911
Even before Kirchner moved to Berlin in October 1911, the seminal Berlin-based periodical Der Sturm was featuring his woodcuts on its cover.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1913
Kirchner's street scene, showing prostitutes prowling for their next customers, uses garish colors and jagged planes to emphasize the intoxicating modernity of Berlin.
Ludwig Meidner
1912
In the years before World War I, Meidner loved roaming the nighttime streets of Berlin, which thrilled him with new experiences and sights unavailable in his small hometown.
Max Liebermann
1914
This cover of Kriegszeit shows a mass of people surging in support of Wilhelm II, who announces the beginning of World War I from the castle balcony.
George Grosz
1917
Bathed in a fiery glow, Grosz's Berlin is as hellish as the battlefield. The disorienting, tilted space emphasizes the social and moral upheavals of the tumultuous war years.
Moritzburg
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
(1909), published 1910
At the Moritzburg lakes, which he began visiting in 1909, Kirchner discovered a world of peace and harmony, where bodies could move freely in nature, away from the constraints of modern bourgeois life.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
(1909, published 1910)
This woodcut, also dating from Kirchner's first trip to the Moritzburg lakes, embodies the freedom he found in nature. Here, in touch with nature, nudes play unselfconsciously in the reeds.
Erich Heckel
1911
The subject of harmonious nudes in nature was also central to Heckel's work. This woodcut dates from Heckel's third and final trip with Kirchner to the Moritzburg lakes in summer 1911.
Erich Heckel
1911
In this woodcut of frolicking nudes, which also dates to his last trip to Moritzburg, Heckel captures the spontaneity and carefree pleasures the Brücke artists enjoyed there.
Dresden
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1908 (reworked 1919; dated on painting 1907)
In this bustling street scene of Dresden's premier shopping avenue, Kirchner emphasizes the disorienting and anonymous qualities of modern urban life.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
(1909)
In contrast to Kirchner's elegant street scene, this etching depicts the less trafficked, working-class neighborhood known as the "Potholder district," where he lived and worked.
Erich Heckel
(1909), dated 1910
In their studios, the Dresden-based Brücke artists created a world removed from everyday life. This woodcut by Heckel probably shows Ernst Ludwig Kirchner with two nude models in the background.
Erich Heckel
1910
Heckel made this woodcut, an interpretation of a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, for the catalogue of the Brücke's breakthrough exhibition at Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden.
Dangast
Erich Heckel
1907 (published 1908)
This woodcut dates from Heckel's first summer spent in Dangast, where he focused on depicting the elemental power of nature.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
1909
Schmidt-Rottluff, who spent four summers in Dangast beginning in 1907, emphasized the raw, monumental landscape of the coast.
Fehmarn
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
(July 23, 1914)
Kirchner drew this self-portrait on a blank postcard, showing himself wearing the jaunty, casual clothes typical of the Baltic resort town of Fehmarn.
Frankfurt
Max Beckmann
1917
After suffering a nervous breakdown during World War I, Beckmann moved to Frankfurt am Main. The style of this painting was inspired by Old Master works he saw in the city's collections.
Max Beckmann
(1918, published 1919)
Beckmann shows a peaceful view of Frankfurt, with the Wilhelm Bridge (today known as the Peace Bridge) and the cupola of the Städel art museum in the background.
Max Beckmann
(1916, published 1919)
Beckmann mused, "By chance I landed in Frankfurt am Main. Here I found a stream that I liked, a few friends, and a studio as well." The Battenbergs were his closest friends in Frankfurt and provided his studio.
Nidden
Max Pechstein
1911 (published 1912)
In 1909, Pechstein spent the first of many summers in Nidden, where he lived in a simple fishing hut along the shore. He was fascinated by the seemingly timeless and uncorrupted way of life there.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
(1913), published 1914
Probably at Pechstein's urging, Schmidt-Rottluff retreated to Nidden after the Brücke artists' group disbanded in 1913. The landscape struck Schmidt-Rottluff as totally foreign, as if he had left the German Empire behind.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
(1914)
Schmidt-Rottluff first embraced the theme of nudes moving freely in nature while he was working in Nidden. The nude subsequently became an increasingly important subject in his art.
Vienna
Fritz Zeymer
1907
This is an illustration of a performance at the Cabaret Fledermaus, a nightclub in Vienna where the city's modern elites whiled away their boredom.
Oskar Kokoschka
1917 (executed 1907–08)
Kokoschka's fairytale of awakening adolescent sexuality points to the anxieties and desires lurking just beneath Vienna's elegant and decorous exteriors. It was exhibited at the Kunstschau exhibition of contemporary art in Vienna in 1908.
Oskar Kokoschka
1909
This poster advertised the premiere of Kokoschka's play Murderer, Hope of Women at the second Kunstschau exhibition of contemporary art in 1909. Its barbarous plot, language, and staging scandalized the city.
Egon Schiele
1910 (published 1912)
Schiele cropped a self-portrait, showing his face in a confrontational grimace, for use in this advertisement for a lecture by cultural critic Egon Friedell at an avant-garde cultural association in Vienna.
Egon Schiele
(1914, published 1922)
In his studio in Vienna, Schiele created powerfully expressive nudes using taut, sinuous lines. Their awkward poses and blatant sexuality challenged the city's bourgeois complacency.
Munich
Vasily Kandinsky
(1901)
Classical warriors storm a fortress in this poster for the first exhibition of the progressive Phalanx group, founded in Munich in 1901. With this poster, Kandinsky announces that the battle for the new art had begun.
Vasily Kandinsky
(1903)
Kandinsky once told his companion Gabriele Münter, whom he met in Munich, that this woodcut depicted his love for her. This mysterious image evokes a fairytale world, far from the modern city.
Vasily Kandinsky
(1908–09)
This woodcut of a couple on horseback beneath an idealized city on a hill served as the membership card for the New Artists' Association Munich, an organization Kandinsky spearheaded in 1909.
Max Oppenheimer (MOPP)
1911
This poster advertises the Austrian-born artist's first solo exhibition at the prestigious Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich. The police in the conservative Bavarian city banned it as indecent.
Franz Marc
1912
This print was published in the almanac of the Blaue Reiter artists' association, which had its first exhibition at the Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich in December 1911.
Vasily Kandinsky
(1913)
In Munich, Kandinsky made his final breakthrough to abstraction. This watercolor is a study for Composition VII, an example of his most complex type of nonrepresentational painting.
Hohwacht
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
(1914), published 1919
In 1914, Schmidt-Rottluff spent his first summer in Hohwacht, a quiet Baltic fishing village not frequented by other artists.
Hamburg
Emil Nolde
1910
One of four woodcuts Nolde made during his three-week trip to Hamburg in winter 1910, this print shows the rolling swells of the sea against the blackness of the fishing steamer.
Emil Nolde
(1910)
Nolde also made 19 etchings during this trip. In this scene of a loading dock at the harbor, Nolde emphasized the hulking ships against the smoky sky and wavy sea.
Emil Nolde
(1910)
This etching of an empty pier captures the cold and gray atmosphere of a late winter day along the harbor, which is eerily devoid of human presence.
Max Beckmann
(1912), dated 1913
By contrast, Beckmann's lithograph, dating from his trip to the city in 1912, focuses on the city's human pleasures, showing prostitutes in front of one of the city's many brothels near the harbor.
Max Beckmann
(1914), dated 1916, published 1918
Beckmann first sketched this scene of a brutal murder, probably in a brothel, during his 1912 stay in Hamburg. This print was made several years later.
Erich Heckel
(1913), dated 1914
Heckel spent part of summer 1913 north of Hamburg in the nature reserves around the Alster valley, where collector and Brücke supporter Gustav Schiefler had a house.
Flensburg
Emil Nolde
1913
Dancer was the last—and his favorite—of the prints that Nolde made at the Westphalen lithography workshop in Flensburg during an eight-week period in 1913.
Emil Nolde
(1913)
This is one of 68 color variants Nolde made of this lithograph during an extraordinarily experimental period in 1913 when he created lithographs at the Westphalen workshop in Flensburg.
Emil Nolde
(1913)
Another variation of Young Couple reveals Nolde's excitement and, in the artist's own words, the "pure sensual abandon and creative joy" he felt while working at the Westphalen workshop.
Emil Nolde
(1913)
Nolde remained intrigued by the unpredictability printmaking sometimes yielded, which helped fuel his many experiments in color with Young Couple.
Alsen
Emil Nolde
(1907, printed 1915)
Nolde depicts a fishing village on the island Alsen, where he had a house from 1903 to 1916. He printed this lithograph at the nearby Westphalen workshop in Flensburg.
Erich Heckel
1913
At the urging of the collector Gustav Schiefler, Heckel and his future wife, Sidi Riha, explored the hilly, rural landscape of Alsen and the surrounding coast in summer 1913.
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