Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, and also Marc, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff – few other artists are of such enormous significance for the development of modern art in Germany. They and their artist-friends belonged to the two most important artists’ groups of early modernism: Brücke und Blauer Reiter. Today those names stand for the awakening of the Expressionist avant-gardes prior to the First World War, as they liberated colour from any compulsion to reproduce reality and led art towards abstraction. For the first time in more than 25 years, they and their group dynamics are to be exhibited in Germany together with numerous masterpieces of modernism.

Major works by the two groups from the foremost collections of the Buchheim Museum, the Von der Heydt-Museum, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and complemented by important works on loan from national and international lenders will combine to form an intense and extraordinary show. The catalogue and accompanying programme will highlight the artistic achievement of these figures in the context of their time and examine the ambivalent heritage of Expressionism in the 20th century. A collaborative project of the Buchheim Museum of Imagination, Bernried am Starnberger See, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal.