Fritz Bleyl

[3] In 1905, Bleyl along with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and two other architecture students, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, founded the artists group Die Brücke ("The Bridge").

The group aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and find a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge (hence the name) between the past and the present.

[3] They responded both to past artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder, as well as contemporary international avant-garde movements.

[3] Bleyl described one such model, Isabella, a fifteen-year-old girl from the neighbourhood, as "a very lively, beautifully built, joyous individual, without any deformation caused by the silly fashion of the corset and completely suitable to our artistic demands, especially in the blossoming condition of her girlish buds.

It has a narrow, portrait format, more akin to Japanese woodcuts than conventional contemporary prints, and was a distinct contrast to the poster designed by Otto Gussmann for the Third German Exhibition of Applied Arts, which had opened four months previously in Dresden.

[5] Bleyl omits iconography such as a crown, a lamp and a flowing gown, to show a bold nude of the model Isabella full-length above the lettering.

Police censors barred the display of the poster under Paragraph 184, the National Penal Code pornography clause, after perceiving pubic hair in the shadow underneath the stomach.