Die Brücke – founded in Dresden in 1905 by young architecture students – ranks among the most important movements of the German avant-garde. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, later joined by Hermann Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, sought to break with academic art and the bourgeois constraints of their time. In search of new modes of expression – immediate, subjective, charged with emotional intensity – they experimented with colour, form and surface as well as with a range of techniques, becoming a driving force of German Expressionism. Even after the group disbanded in 1913 and each artist went their own way, this shared sensibility endured: art understood as the unmediated expression of feeling.

At the centre of our presentation at Independent 20th Century is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Totentanz der Mary Wigman (1926/1928), one of the major works of his Davos years: the painting finds a compelling pictorial equivalent for dance, translating movement into colour. Kirchner was fascinated by Mary Wigman, one of the foremost pioneers of modern expressionist dance in Germany. Across the boundaries of their respective disciplines, both pursued the same question: How does existential feeling become movement – and movement, form?




Independent 20th Century now at the Breuer Building

The architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981), who trained and later taught at the Bauhaus, emigrated to the United States in 1937 and designed one of New York’s most radical museum buildings for the Whitney Museum in 1966. Following a sensitive renovation by Herzog & de Meuron, it is now Sotheby’s global headquarters – and, for the first time, also the venue for Independent 20th Century.

We look forward to welcoming you.

Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Hermann Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff