Otto Mueller

The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the principal U.S. art museums, visited by up to a half million people every year. Admission is free through a subsidy from the cultural tax district for St. Louis City and County. Located in Forest Park in St. Louis, Missouri, the Museum's three-story building... was constructed as the Palace of the Fine Arts for the 1904 World's Fair, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Architect Cass Gilbert was inspired by the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy. In 2005, the British architect Sir David Chipperfield was selected to design a major addition to the Museum. It will add 224,000 square feet , including aboveground gallery space and underground parking. Construction began in 2009, with completion planned for 2013. Michel Desvigne has been selected as landscape architect. In addition to the featured exhibitions, the Museum offers rotating exhibitions and installations. These include the Currents series, which showcases contemporary artists, as well as regular exhibitions of new media art and works on paper.
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Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto... Mueller. The seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and the creation of expressionism. Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitivist art. Both shared an interest in the expressing of extreme emotion through high-keyed color that was very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke artists' emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings make their French counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison. The founding members of Die Brücke in 1905 were four Jugendstil architecture students: Fritz Bleyl , Erich Heckel , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff .
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