The transformation of painting after 1907 is particularly apparent in works executed in Germany.

Die Brücke, manifesting the growing Expressionist movement, has grown to include Nolde, van Dongen, Max Pechstein, Otto Müller, the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet and the Finnish Symbolist Akseli Gallén-Kallela.

The paintings and prints by Die Brücke artists encompass all varieties of subject matter—the human figure, landscape, portraiture, still life—executed in a simplified style that stresses bold outlines and strong color planes, influenced by Primitivism.

Kirchner and Heckel are influenced by African and Pacific island art that they have seen in the Dresden ethnological museum; this Primitivism becomes an important element in Die Brücke style.

Manifestations of angst, or anxiety, appear in varying degrees in the works of Die Brücke painters and generally distinguish their art from that of the French Fauvists, who also are indebted to primitive art but who treat form and color in a more lyrical manner.

Die Brücke art is also deeply influenced by the expressive simplifications of late German Gothic woodcuts and by Munch's prints.

Kirchner's studies of the nude, such as Bathers at Moritzburg (1908;Tate Gallery, London), are often explicitly erotic, and in his lithograph Head of a Man with a Nude (1908), his fantasy of sexual aggression reaches nightmare intensity, but his worldly subjects represent only one aspect of the group; Nolde's earthy Primitivism of and Schmidt-Rottluff's emphatic pictorial rhetoric are more typical.

Both Nolde and Pechstein travel to the Pacific, but Nolde, a solitary and intuitive painter, after belonging for a year and a half dissociates himself from the tightly knit group.