Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Art History
Advisor
Romy Golan
Committee Members
Michael Lobel
John Maciuika
Megan Luke
Subject Categories
Modern Art and Architecture | Theory and Criticism
Keywords
German Expressionism, Die Brücke, Wilhelmine Germany
Abstract
This dissertation examines the development of the modernist movement known as German Expressionism through its earliest representatives, the group known as Die Brücke (The Bridge), active between 1905 and 1913. In particular, “Spiritualized Machines” argues that in emerging against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing pre-World War I Wilhelmine Germany (1888-1918), the Brücke artists Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Max Pechstein internalized in their art and theory the dictates of the newly industrialized culture around them. In so doing, Die Brücke charted new forms of affect joined to the aesthetics, philosophies, and politics of the machine. They thus prefigured a later, interwar European machine aesthetic and modeled a transitional, historical German subject informed by both the country’s accelerated capitalism and a broader, primitivizing emphasis on the liberation of feeling as such.
To pursue its revisionist argument, this dissertation mobilizes Die Brücke’s background in modern architecture and design, as traced through their early pedagogical and professional networks in the city of Dresden. Rather than training in fine art academies, the founding members of Die Brücke studied in technical colleges and applied arts schools. Through these institutions, the artists encountered practitioners, theorists, and historians in the Kunstgewerbebewegung (Applied Arts Movement) committed to forging a new industrial aesthetic.
Each of this project’s four case studies thus reads an emblematic facet of Die Brücke’s joint career through a matrix of German architecture and design, as well as the commercial, economic, and technological changes with which these two fields grappled. Chapter 1 argues for the group’s timed life drawing around 1906 as a negotiation of gestural and “architectonic” form. Chapter 2 positions Die Brücke’s woodcut practice of 1906 as a response to changing paradigms in German manufacturing and the shifting values attributed to craft labor. Chapter 3 explores a type of uncanny or animated commodity seen in both in Die Brücke’s depictions of their studio from around 1910 and in the Applied Arts Movement. Chapter 4 traces a discourse of Sachlichkeit as it played out between Die Brücke’s mature, primitivist style of 1910; industrial design and theory; and German anthropology and ethnography.
Through these new readings of Die Brücke’s art and context, “Spiritualized Machines” seeks to reconfigure the role of German Expressionism within German art and the historic avant-garde more broadly. It argues that Die Brücke’s art complicates a standard historiographic cleft that sees Expressionism as an “organic” anteriority to more critical, technologized successors such as Dada. More broadly, “Spiritualized Machines” aims to lend formal, theoretical, and political complexity to the art historical notion of expressivity and its correlates of affect, feeling, and subjectivity.
Recommended Citation
Henry, Joseph, "Spiritualized Machines: Die Brücke, Expressionism, and Wilhelmine Modernity" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6486
