In 1905 the former architecture students Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl founded Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of artists whose goal it was to find new ways of artistic expression neglecting the techniques and ideas taught at art academies by the time and to bridge the gap between the different artistic disciplines.

The young artists initially isolate themselves and spend most of the time together in a working-class neighborhood of Dresden, aiming thereby to reject their own bourgeois backgrounds and to concentrate on developing their rigorous style and ideology. Erich Heckel was able to obtain an empty butcher's shop on the Berlinerstrasse in Friedrichstadt for their use as a communal studio. The group developed a style based on vivid color, emotional tension and violent imagery, which was strongly influenced by the Primitivism they studied in the vast collections of African, Oceanic, East Asian and Indian sculpture at the museums in Dresden and Berlin.

If not in Dresden the group was to be found working on landscape paintings and female nudes outside of Dresden near the Lakes in Moritzburg. Kirchner – the most prolific and talented draughtsmen of the group at that time - always had his sketchbook at hand to quickly capture what was happening around him. Crouching Dodo shows Doris „Dodo“ Grosse - Kirchner’s girlfriend and preferred model during the Dresden years – crouching on a wooden stool from Cameroon that was given to him by Erich Heckel’s brother Manfred who was working as an engineer in the German colony in East Africa at the time. The drawing doesn’t give away any details of the room, but it is most likely that it was drawn in Kirchner’s studio, which he painted and decorated with wooden sculptures strongly influenced by the work of primitive artists.

The drawing consists of very confident lines that emphasize the outlines and the solid posture of the sitter. The nudity of the sitter does not seem to be important. The drawing is about the posture of the sitter and the energy that surrounds it. The crouching pose is very typical not only for Kirchner’s drawings at the time, but foremost for his rare wooden sculptures. The stool is one of Kirchner’s favourite pieces of primitive art that appears not only in his drawings, but also in a few of his most important paintings of the time.