Fifty scattered Kirchner, Nolde and Kandinsky works reassemble to tell German Expressionism's story as the alternative to Paris and Cubism.
The National Gallery on Trafalgar Square assembles 50 German Expressionist works from collections worldwide, from Saturday 20 March to Sunday 1 August 2027. They tell a story of early modernism that does not run through Paris.
The usual account of early twentieth-century art runs through Picasso, Braque and cubism. German Expressionism distorted the object until it carried feeling.
Die Brücke formed in Dresden in 1905 and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1911. Between them they produced the hot colour, the cut lines and the woodcut roughness that most people now read as anxiety.
Its names are Kirchner, Nolde, Marc, Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and Kollwitz. The movement ended in 1914, when the First World War sent its artists into the military or out of the country. The Nazis later attacked it as degenerate art, and so much of it left Germany that the works are now scattered worldwide.
Organised with the National Gallery of Ireland, the show in the Sainsbury Wing brings Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter together under one roof for the first time. The Gallery’s own collection stops around 1900, so an exhibition about what came after is a departure.