.. he [is Kirchner, writing about himself] was especially interested in the naturally naked human being. He knowingly broke the traditional manner of the nude study and created for himself in his studio [in his Brucke-years in Berlin] a circle of young women, whom he studied in their free movement. Thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings and studies resulted from this. A beautiful, healthy, blossoming sensuality that never turns base emanates from these works.
.. and the first thing for he artists [of Die Brucke ] was free drawing from the free human figure in the freedom of nature… We drew and we painted. Hundreds of paintings a day, with talk and fooling in between, the artists joining the models before the easel and vice versa. All the encounters of everyday life were incorporated in our memories in this way. The studio became the home of the people who were being drawn; they learned from the artists and the painters from them. The picture [ made] took on immediate and abundant life.
Did you know that in 1900 I had the bold idea of renewing German art?… First of all I needed to invent a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion, and it was Rembrandts drawings in the Kupferstichkabinett in Munich that showed me how. I practiced seizing things quickly in bold strokes, wherever I was, walking and standing still…. and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself, and I found new forms in the ecstasy and haste of this work…. and to these forms was added pure colour, as pure as the sun generates it…. in line with Goethe's theory [of colours]. It makes pictures much more colorful. Making wood-cuts, which I'd learnt as a fifteen-year-old from my father, helped me to stabler and simpler forms. And armed in this way I returned to Dresden.