Germany

About

German art first reached a European peak around 1500. Albrecht Dürer carried Italian ideas north and spread his fame through engravings and woodcuts, painting a frontal, Christ-like Self-Portrait in 1500. Matthias Grünewald showed a tortured, greenish body on the Isenheim Altarpiece, and limewood carvers such as Tilman Riemenschneider left surfaces unpainted. Three centuries later, Caspar David Friedrich placed lone figures before misty mountains and seas.

The 20th century was turbulent. Die Brücke, founded in Dresden in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others, cut raw woodcuts and painted in clashing colour. After the First World War, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann painted a damaged society, Käthe Kollwitz made prints of grief, and August Sander photographed Germans by profession. The Bauhaus, founded in 1919, rethought design. After Nazi persecution of modern art, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher rebuilt German art on new terms.