Kirchner's last drawing in the publication of 100 drawings by the artist, published by Will Grohmann in 1925, perhaps even at the beginning of 1925, was the first indication of his shift towards the "New Style". In the following years, he developed this in a strict simplification of form and color and increasing abstraction into an independent and idiosyncratic variant of the general European efforts at the same time towards a painting and sculpture of color fields and volumes framed by endless loops, which was then called "Abstraction-Création" in Paris in 1931 with the founding of a group with the same name. This group soon included up to 400 international artists, from the oldest, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky *1866, to the youngest, the Japanese Taro Okamoto *1911. This development was abruptly interrupted in 1937 and only revived in 1948, when it expanded from a more European to a global phenomenon.

Our exhibition aims to tell this story of art in the middle of the 20th century, which developed over and through the violent caesura of the art ban, the Second World War and the Shoah, and yet somehow always remained coherent, using a number of very different case studies.