“It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

In 1905, painter and printmaker Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, along with Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff—all untrained in the visual arts—founded the artists’ group Die Brücke, or “The Bridge,” a moment that is now considered the birth of German Expressionism. Impelled, in Kirchner’s words, to express themselves “directly and authentically,”1 they rejected academic art as stultifying and searched for means to make work that possessed a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. They culled inspiration from the emotionally expressive works of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch; Oceanic and African art they encountered at ethnographic museums; and German Gothic and Renaissance art, which led them to enthusiastically embrace the woodcut, a print medium through which they pioneered their signature style, characterized by simplified forms, radical flattening, and vivid, non-naturalistic colors.

The Brücke artists craved to “bring life and art into harmony,”2 upending conventions in both to cultivate what they considered a more instinctual and natural way of being—a reaction shared with a larger German youth movement against new realities of urbanization and conservative imperial German society. In their communal studio, decorated with non-Western art and erotic images, they made life-drawings from nude models in unselfconscious, informal poses. They spent summers together with their girlfriends on lakes near Dresden, allowing nudity and free love to reign, and conjuring this bohemian existence in their works. Kirchner’s woodcut of four nudes moving tranquilly in a rhythmic frieze, Bathers Throwing Reeds (1909), typifies this period, embodying Brücke’s utopic vision of a world untouched by encroaching industrialization and other alienating forces of modern life.

Once Kirchner moved to Berlin, in 1911, and after Brücke disbanded, in 1913, he found a subject in Berlin itself, newly established as a cosmopolitan metropolis. He captured its hectic pace, chaotic intersections, and crowded sidewalks, focusing in particular on streetwalkers in his monumental series of 11 paintings known as Berlin Street Scenes. Among them is Street, Berlin (1913), in which two finely dressed prostitutes with mask-like faces command the center of the street as indistinguishable men lurk in their wake. Kirchner found in prostitutes an apt symbol for Berlin, where anything could be bought and the potential for intrigue or danger was folded into the experience of moving with the ever growing, anonymous crowds pulsing through the city.

At the outbreak of World War I, Kirchner volunteered for service, but he soon experienced a physical and mental breakdown and was discharged. After convalescing in sanatoriums near Davos, he spent the rest of his life in the area, portraying its rural scenery, mountains, and villagers in his work. He also began to experiment with abstraction, reflecting his goal for “the participation of present-day German art in the international modern sense of style.”3 But the Nazis deemed Kirchner’s art “un-German,” and in 1937, as part of their Degenerate Art campaign—waged against works of modern art, which they seized by the thousands from museums and private collections—they removed more than 600 of his paintings from public collections. The following year, he took his own life.

Note: Opening quote is from Wye, Deborah., and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kirchner and the Berlin Street (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008) 36.

Hillary Reder, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2016

  1. Debbie Wye, Kirchner and the Berlin Street (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 20.

  2. Debbie Wye, Kirchner and the Berlin Street (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 20.

  3. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Retrospective, ed. Felix Krämer (Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz; Frankfurt: Städel Museum, 2010), 21.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.
Wikidata
Q229272
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
German painter. Comment on works: expressionist
Nationalities
German, Swiss
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Author, Designer, Fresco Painter, Etcher, Lithographer, Illustrator, Painter, Photographer, Sculptor
Names
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Louis de Marsalle, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, ErnStLudwig Kirchner, E Kirchner, L. de Marselle, E. L. Kirchner, L. De Marsalle, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, Kirchner, Emil Ludwig Kirchner, ludwig kirchner
Ulan
500027704
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

176 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Being Modern: Building the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 288 pages
  • Kirchner and the Berlin Street Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 138 pages
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