Born in 1884 with the name of Karl Schmidt in Rottluff, he added in 1905 the name of Rottluff to his sir name for his birthplace of Rottluff, a district in the town of Chemnitz in Saxony, Germany. That same year, he was part of a group of German architecture students who, in Dresden, first exhibited together with the name Die Brucke* (The Bridge), an organization that existed until 1913 and whose goal was to "bridge" their modernist, avant-garde* style with the prevalent Romanticism* and other traditional movements of the past. As a group focused on harsh social realities and inner emotional responses, it had a major impact on paving the way to acceptance of 20th Century modernist art movements.

Founding members in...