“We call all young people together, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom of our actions and our lives from the older comfortably established forces”. This was from the manifesto of the young German expressionist art group that this stamp remembers 100 years later. The group called itself the bridge, but was that really the only bridge to take? Might there have been another that uplifts the viewer of the art not just the artist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Look at the darkness of this woodblock image on the stamp. An underage girl, not trying to make a record of her innocent beauty, but rather how she appeared in the twice her age artist’s den of “free love”. Was the artist made better from the experience. Was the young girl. Was the viewer of the art. Or are we all just a little dirtier.
Todays stamp is issue A1174, a 55 Euro cents stamp issued by Germany on May12th, 2005. It was a single stamp issue. According to Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 75 cents used.
Around 1900, there was much innovation going on in the Paris art world. Where does that leave the artists of other places. To a group of German artists toiling away at their upper middle class University this was an opportunity. They were not interested in creating traditional art. Rather they wanted to to do a more German version of what was going on in Paris with the Fauvists. Typical not as smart as they think they are out of the box thinking that is really pressing up on the box. There were of course paintings, but they went back to pre Christian Germany and sought to recreate the old woodblock art of that time. To banish their minds of their upper class comforts, Die Brucke rented a former butcher shop in the seedier side of Dresden. The studio justified their mostly underage subjects by saying the bodies are less damaged by the corsets of period mature women. Also more fun to have in a free love den where nudity was encouraged.
Most of the artists of the group faded away into jobs in academia. Their art, though remembered, was not commercially successful in the period. As the young rebels matured they faced a different Germany that was as denouncing of them as they were to their parents. The style of art was branded un German, anarchist, and Jewish, some of the artists were some weren’t. The Nazis were or course wrong about so much, but I am not sure they were wrong about Die Brucke.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast those that push back against the drive away from civilization. Come again tomorrow when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.