From Die Brucke to Der Blaue Reiter: 120 key works of German Expressionism from two acclaimed European collections

Pitching themselves against both academic aridity and the alienating effects of industrialized society, the Dresden painters known as Die Brucke merged the depiction of landscape with the expression of inner life, often conveyed through dramatic use of color. Simultaneously, the authors of the Munich almanac Der Blaue Reiter likewise cultivated a new idiom of inwardness in art, which allowed for the purely intuitive as much as for cultivated reason. Both groups dramatically expanded and interrogated standards of beauty.

This volume, accompanying an exhibition curated by Ivan Ristic at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, presents some 120 works from the Swiss Braglia Collection and the German Johenning Collection, including paintings by Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, August Macke and Franz Marc, as well as Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paul Klee and Lionel Feininger.