“1913: The Brücke and Berlin”

It was a momentous year, not just in the wider history of modernism—with the publication of such landmark works as Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Alcools—but in particular for the Expressionist collective known as Die Brücke. Having relocated to Berlin from Dresden, Germany, two years previously, in 1913 three of the group’s remaining protagonists—Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff—were preparing a chronicle that was to serve as both a catalogue and a summation of its activities over the eight years of its existence. Kirchner took on the task of penning the text, and when Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff read it, they thought he had unduly cast himself as the leader. Latent tensions came to a head, Die Brücke disbanded, and its members

— Travis Jeppesen