The Primitivist Nude in the Tradition of the Bridge

In 1905, four men came together to begin an art movement that would majorly shift the portrayal of the female nude in Europe. United by a desire to be closer to nature and to find self-understanding beyond urbanized Germany, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff formed The Bridge artist group in Dresden in 1905. They were later joined by Emily Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Müller. In the early twentieth century, the members of the Bridge congregated in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s bohemian-style studio. They met to draw and share ideas with one another, all desiring radical change in the art community with respect to non-naturalism. They traveled together to the lakes in Moritzburg outside of Dresden in order to paint nude subjects in a green landscape, integrating humans into a natural environment. Kirchner referred to the group as “one big family.”[1]

All the members of the Bridge maintained an emphasis on anti-academic art, art that resisted the classical norms. While the artists of the Bridge wanted to push boundaries and break away from the mainstream, Bridge artist Kirchner maintained that the female nude should be “the basis of all fine art.”[2] In accordance with this idea, the Bridge members all focused on painting a nude that was different from traditional Greco-Roman ideals. Rather, they painted the nude of the non-Western woman, considering her to be closer to nature and holding elusive spirituality. They painted her in vivid colors and jagged angles, rather than in idealistic proportions. They resisted realism in their work as an attempt to rebel against civilized urban society. 

The artists of the Bridge also used the nude to represent a sort of Arcadia, making the figure a characteristic of a greater utopia. Antliff and Leighten describe the idea of primitivism as “appropriating the supposed simplicity and authenticity [of peoples deemed primitive] to the project of transforming Western art.”[3] The Bridge artists did this in their rendering of the nude, which they conveyed with through simplified form, although each artist worked in different ways.

Pechstein’s nude in The Indian and Woman is set in a contrived studio scene. Müller paints the nude in nature in his Three Girls in a Wood. Kirchner presents the nude as sculpture made of wood, to mirror a natural material, in Standing Nude, showing that he was looking to Oceanic and African art as models. All of these works, however, emphasize the theme of the primitivist nude and show this shared theme of the Bridge. The composition of each piece is well thought out, yet they maintain almost a crude, spontaneous element to them. This is because the artists felt that the people from outside of Europe and North America were raw. They were ostensibly closer to nature, they did not wear much clothing, and they seemed much different than Europeans, as they were apparently untouched by city life.

Despite their very different personalities, all of the Bridge artists were enticed by non-Western cultures, because they wanted a return to nature and simplicity during the urbanization of Germany. They resented the Academy and sought innovative practices in the rendering of art. Müller, Pechstein, and Kirchner all use diverse techniques and mediums, but they employ the general characteristics attributed to their ideas of the primitivist nude. Each of the forms is simplified and has a coarse quality to it, unlike the Greco-Roman classical nude, which was formerly the quintessential nude in art. The artists of the Bridge sought to create novel ideas in the European art world, while also exploring a world to which they wanted access, but could never have.