d Oceania at once in their own musuem; thus, they immediately became acquainted with a range and variety of style which the French took many years to discover. Owing perhaps partly to this circumstance and partly to their artistic intentions, the members of Die Brcke never regarded primitive art as merely a curiosity, as many of the Fauvists did (Lloyd 50). As Emil Nolde wrote, it was at once "raised up to the level of art pleasing, ripe, original art" (Harrison and Wood 101). What fascinated the German expressionists was the power and immediacy of primitive art, as Nolde said, "its absolute primitiveness, its intense, often grotesque expression of strength and life in the very simplest form" (Harrison and Wood 101).It was this emotional intensity that the Die Brcke artists tried to duplicate in their artwork. Although not as interested in the aesthetic technique of the primitive, the German expressionists realized the power and raw expressiveness of simplification and incorporated elements of it into their style. They accomplished this, however, with a darker, more saturated color scheme and a closer juxtaposition of opposing hues (Lloyd 56). Gone also are the graceful lines of the fauves' figures; in their place are almost flipper-like hands and feet which seem to terminate in and become part of the surrounding foliage, reinforcing the human communion with nature that the Fauvists evoked in their primitivist works.The viewer finds again and again the theme of the union of the nude figure with nature in Die Brcke German expressionist artwork, particularly in the works of Kirchner. This is in part due to Kirchner's search for the "natural in man and nature" (Goldwater 80). For example, in Girl Under Japanese Umbrella (1909) and Reclining Blue Nude with a Straw Hat (1909), a nude woman is depicted reclining in the grass. Her isolation from the figures in the background reinforces her solitary communion with the nature that surr...
