Gurlitt collection shown in Bern

"Of all of us, he gave the brightest and purest timbre to color," declared Franz Marc after his friend and fellow artist August Macke fell in World War I in 1914. Macke painted his sailboat images at Lake Tegernsee in Bavaria. This painting was among the roughly 1,500 found in the Cornelius Gurlitt collection.

Slender women are a characteristic motif of the influential German expressionist art movement. This model reposes unclothed on a water-surrounded rock.

A difficult, suspicious and depressed man, Kirchner created this wood cutting in 1922. Nazis removed many of his works from German museums and defamed them as "degenerate." Born in the German region of Franconia, Kirchner was buried in Switzerland.

The artist had a reputation for social criticism even as a young man. "I can't get ahead; my paintings can't be sold. I'm either becoming famous or infamous," he said in 1920, not long before finishing this painting.

"My homeland was like a fairytale, my parents' home in the flat countryside, thousands of larks soaring up and down in jubilation, my country of wonder from sea to sea," enthused the North German painter Maler Emil Nolde. Broad expanses and the blurred transitions between sky, earth and water were his motifs.

No motif or animal fascinated Marc more than horse, a metaphor for purity and innocence in the eyes of this expressionist painter. His daring experimentation with color resulted in a group of paintings of blue horses in 1910. This image, also in the Gurlitt collection, was a predecessor.