Felix Meseck was born 11 June 1883 in Danzig, Germany, and died 17 June 1955 in Holzminden, Germany. He studied at the Fine Art Academies in Berlin and Königsberg, studying painting under Ludwig Dettmann and printmaking with Heinrich Wolff. In 1926…

Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was born as Emil Hansen in Nolde, a town in the North of Germany. He was initially trained as a woodcarver but started to paint as an independent artist in 1898. Before he settled in 1903 in Alsen during the summer and in…

Christian Rohlfs (1849-1938) was born in Nierendorf and studied first in Berlin and then in Weimar where he met Liebermann in 1874. In 1901, he left Weimar and, following an invitation by the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, went to Hagen where he…

Christian Schad was born on August 21, 1894 in Miesbach, Upper Bavaria, Germany, and died on February 25, 1982 in Stuttgart, Germany. Before World War I he attended the Munich Academy for a short time. In 1913 his first woodcuts appeared in various…

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) was born in Rottluff and studied architecture in Dresden with Erich Heckel before they formed, with Bleyl and Kirchner, “die Brücke” in 1905. The group were influenced by the works of Nietzsche and Schmidt-Rottluff…

Richard Ziegler was born 3 May 1891 in Pforzheim, Germany, and died 23 February 1992. Ziegler was entirely self-taught and turned to painting full-time after the First World War at the age of 29. He travelled extensively and his Italian landscapes…

The group was a loose association of highly individualistic artists, of varying international backgrounds. Faced with a rapidly changing industrialised Germany, they yearned for a more spiritual alternative. The name and the symbol of the group was…

These artists felt that Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the social, political and economic crises of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) left no place for the early Expressionists’ utopian vision of life. This was replaced by a detached…

The painter and printmaker Otto Mueller (1874-1930) was born in Liebau, Silesia. Before studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Art between 1896 and 1898 he had been a lithographer in Görlitz. In 1898, he moved away from the big city life to…

Many ex-soldiers returning home from the First World War had terrible injuries, lost limbs or were blind. This poor man has to resort to selling small trinkets or matches on the streets, a bleak and lonely existence. His head raises up, as if he is…