Cultural Nationalism, Brücke and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity

Brücke's 1913 Chronik , the single ‘official’ document of the German Expressionist group's history, records the importance of print‐making and particularly the woodcut in the formation of the artist group's innovative and experimental avant‐garde style. Significantly, the document denies the group's immediate French influences and omits mention of Brücke's early reliance upon Jugendstil sources. Instead, their account points to the German medieval woodcut as the group's inspiration, thereby simultaneously linking Brücke to the German artistic tradition while drawing upon the woodcut's ideological associations of national and spiritual renewal. Whereas scholars commonly point to the appropriation of so‐called ‘primitivist’ art as the means by which Brücke arrived at their avant‐garde style, this paper argues for the significance of the woodcut medium in the formation of Brücke's collective identity and mature painting style. The paper examines how Brücke masked their Jugendstil origins to take credit for the rediscovery of the late medieval and Early Renaissance woodcut, and drew upon the nineteenth‐century reception of the woodcut as an icon of Germanness in order to assert their ‘cultural difference’ from French art.