Frames

The artists of the Brücke group not only produced paintings, but also the immediate surroundings for them, namely the picture frames. The desire to create a unity of image and frame prompted them to design their own profiles for their frames, to adorn these with decorative elements, and to finish the surfaces in bronze and other colors.

It was primarily Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde who worked intensively on the design of their picture frames. Brücke-Museum owns a large number of paintings with original frames, of which some are presented in this album, whereby the sheer quantity of these works derives from the fact that many of them were donated to the museum by the artists themselves. Today there are only very few of these combined pieces left. The exhibition Never Apart is dedicated to this aspect of Expressionism, which previously garnered little attention.