Fauves and Expressionists, the same year, two countries

Two breaks, a single year

The pairing is not just a matter of convenient hanging. Both movements break, at the same moment, with the same constraint — the faithful rendering of light that Impressionism upheld — but they do not get there by the same road. The French start from pure colour and optics: they pastiche, exaggerate, then abandon Van Gogh and pointillism for a colour that no longer has to account for reality. The Germans start from anxiety and distortion: medieval woodcuts, Munch, the so-called "primitive" art of ethnographic collections matter to them as much as colour itself. The result looks alike on a gallery wall; the intent behind it diverges.

The link between the two scenes did not remain purely theoretical. In September 1908 and again in January 1909, a Matisse exhibition passes through Dresden and then the Cassirer gallery in Berlin — Kirchner sees it. From that point, the colour of Die Brücke changes: it becomes more direct, laid in flatter planes, less tormented in the brushwork. This is not, then, a simple coincidence of timing between two avant-gardes unaware of each other: the German Expressionists looked at the French Fauves at the very moment they were searching for their own language, without ever merging into it.

1. Die Brücke, the bridge from Dresden

Die Brücke was born on 7 June 1905 in Dresden, founded by four young men fresh out of architecture studies: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt, who took the name Schmidt-Rottluff. None had trained as a painter — this was precisely their shared, self-proclaimed point: not to be bound by any school. Max Pechstein joined them in 1906 through Heckel; he took part from September in the group's first exhibition, in a former lamp factory in Dresden, and designed the poster for the second in December of the same year. He was the only member of the group with a complete academic art education.

Two canvases in the room tell this story of companionship. Pechstein's Horse Fair was painted in 1910 at Moritzburg, near Dresden, where he joined Kirchner and Heckel for a summer spent painting outdoors by the lakes — a practice common to the group at this period. Kirchner's Landscape with Chestnut Tree, meanwhile, dates from 1913: he painted it on the island of Fehmarn, in the Baltic Sea, where he then spent several summers away from Dresden and Berlin. The brushwork there is more nervous, more abrupt than in his 1910 canvases — a change in handling that the museum's own notes flag as a novelty in his painting that year.

2. Nolde, the companion who stayed apart

Emil Nolde holds a place of his own in this story. Noticed by Schmidt-Rottluff in early 1906 for Van Gogh-influenced canvases shown at the Ernst Arnold gallery in Dresden, he joined Die Brücke that same spring — but he was then thirty-nine, nearly twenty years older than the founders, with a career already under way. The cohabitation lasted little more than a year: he left the group in November 1907, for reasons as personal as artistic. He continued on his own, on a register Die Brücke did not really share: a painting inhabited by the religious and the mystical, in colours that grew ever more incandescent.

This independence did not protect him later on. Nolde joined the Nazi party in 1934, convinced his painting represented an authentically German art. The regime judged otherwise: during the so-called "degenerate art" campaign of 1937, more than a thousand of his works were removed from German museums — more than any other artist. Kirchner, dozens of whose canvases were seized the same year, was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts. This fate does not directly concern the canvases shown here, which entered the Thyssen collection much later through the art market; it nonetheless weighs on how this generation of painters is viewed today.

3. Vlaminck and Dufy, the French shore

Vlaminck did not pass through the South of France like other Fauves: his geography was the Seine at Chatou, where he met André Derain in 1900 and shared a studio with him for a time. The two men painted the same riverbanks — Chatou, Bougival, Rueil — with a freedom of colour that anticipated Fauvism before the term existed; the period is sometimes called the "school of Chatou." In 1905, at the Salon d'Automne, Vlaminck exhibited alongside Matisse and Derain in the very room that would give the group its name.

Dufy, born in Le Havre, also started out from Impressionism — Monet and Pissarro were his first points of reference. The break came in March 1905, when he discovered Matisse's Luxury, Calm and Pleasure at the Salon des Indépendants: he would later say the painting made him lose his taste for realist Impressionism. A Fauve period followed, from 1905 to 1907, painted largely in Normandy, in Le Havre and Sainte-Adresse. He then moved away from it — as early as 1908, alongside Braque at L'Estaque, his painting took a quite different, more constructed direction, under the influence of Cézanne.

How much time

Room H can be covered in about fifteen minutes if you stop at the historical markers and one canvas per artist; twice that if you take the time to compare the brushwork from one wall to the next.

Markers on Fauvism and Expressionism — 2 minutes.
Kirchner, Landscape with Chestnut Tree — 3 minutes.
Pechstein, Horse Fair — 3 minutes.
Nolde, his canvases in the room — 3 minutes.
Vlaminck and Dufy — 4 minutes.

Sources and verification

Checked against the artwork and artist pages of the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, and cross-checked with sources on Die Brücke and Fauvism.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.