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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) sought to give form to subjective impressions through vehement renderings of nature, tempered by an emphasis on compositional structure that constantly increased in significance as he matured.

Born on May 6, 1880, in Aschaffenburg, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent most of his childhood in Chemnitz. Following his parents' wishes, he began to study architecture in 1901 at the Dresden Technical High School, but much of his attention was given to painting symbolistic Jugendstil works. In Munich in 1903-1904 to continue his architectural studies, he familiarized himself with paintings by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt. A major influence on Kirchner was the neo-impressionist exhibition of 1904.

Founding of the Brücke

On his return to Dresden, Kirchner met Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who were also painters studying architecture. After Kirchner received his diploma in architecture in 1905, the four artists set up a common studio and organized themselves as the Brücke (bridge). Intellectually greatly influenced by Nietzsche, they considered themselves an artistic, bohemian elite having as their mission the salvation of German art. In the Brücke program Kirchner wrote: "With faith in the future, in a generation of creators as well as supporters, we call all youth together. And as the youth carrying the future, we shall gain elbow room and breathing space in opposition to the stale, old powers. Whoever immediately and truthfully reproduces his own drive to creation belongs to us." Working closely together, the painters evolved a common style dependent on neo-impressionism, Vincent Van Gogh, and Edvard Munch. Since 1904 Kirchner had been creating woodcuts inspired by Félix Vallotton and the German Renaissance artists, and his colleagues adopted the technique; Kirchner, in turn, learned wood carving and lithography from them.

Early Style

Before disbanding in 1913, the Brücke had been joined by Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller, Cuno Amiet, and Kees van Dongen. Van Dongen provided a significant contact with the French Fauve painters, who had a similar interest in effects of immediate expression. The changes Kirchner's painting style underwent as he came to terms with non-Western art served to divorce his work from the other Brücke painters as he attained a personal style after he moved to Berlin in 1911. While Indian Buddhist painting and African sculpture became the two major sources of his new vocabulary of nervous, jagged forms, the streets of Berlin and the fashionable life of the city became a new motif, joining earlier themes of landscapes, portraits, nudes, and dancers.

Kirchner enlisted in the army when war broke out in 1914, but military training soon resulted in a nervous breakdown. Released from service, he entered a sanatorium in Königstein am Taunus, for which he painted a series of murals (destroyed) and where he created his woodcut series Peter Schlemihl (1916). To continue the cure from his alcohol-and narcotic-induced crisis, Kirchner moved to Davos, Switzerland, in 1917 and turned to the Swiss Alps and themes of peasant life for his paintings and prints. Except for brief trips, he never returned to Germany.

Mature Style

The experience of the Alpine landscape again resulted in a change in Kirchner's style. He continued his goal of expressing emotion and experience through simplified forms and clear colors, but the mechanics of pictorial structure, design, and control also took on added significance. In his views of mountain valleys and Alpine villages, color is applied in flattened, sharply delineated forms as superimposed planes lend a sense of space, combining into what Kirchner termed "hieroglyphs" intended to signify man's inner image of visible reality. The new formal emphasis led to increasingly abstract effects as Kirchner also turned to painting from the imagination rather than from nature. Works by Pablo Picasso provided another stimulus for ornamental paintings, in which Kirchner combines front and side views of objects formed by rhythmic arabesque lines and abstract color planes.

As his works were branded degenerate in Nazi Germany, Kirchner's nervous condition and loneliness returned. He committed suicide on July 15, 1938, at a time when his style seemed once again to be changing.

	Kirchner And The Berlin Street.(Brief article)(Book review) Newspaper article from: Internet Bookwatch; 10/1/2008; 173 words ; ...10019-5497 9780870707414, $35.00, www.moma.org Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a part of the acclaimed German Expressionism...movement in general, and the life and work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in particular. No academic library Art History... Read more
	Previews: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between May and August.(Calendar) Magazine article from: Artforum International; 5/1/2008; 700+ words ; ...Portraits from the 1920s, along comes the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to complete something of a Berlin trilogy. Looking...supporting works on paper) will coincide with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center... Read more
	Kirchner: Expressionism and the City Dresden and Berlin 1905-1918. Magazine article from: Apollo; 10/1/2003; ; 700+ words ; ...title of the London version of this exhibition (as above)--its initial, Washington edition settling for plain 'Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1880-1938'--was suggestive of the superimposition of three distinct aims. At its most straightforward, the show... Read more
	Olbrich overlooked: the fallen star of fin-de-siecle modernism, Austrian architect virtuoso Joseph. Maria extravagantly gifteded but tragically short-lived. A century after his death, he still awaits his proper place in history. Magazine article from: The Magazine Antiques; 12/1/2008; ; 700+ words ; ...Mathildenhohe Park established in 1901 by Ernst Ludwig (1868-1937), grand duke of Hesse (brother...Russia) in his capital of Darmstadt. Ernst Ludwig fell under the spell of the English...latches to an imposing Kunsthalk, the Ernst Ludwig Haus. His patron's deep pockets allowed... Read more
	Arts and crafts perspectives. (Arts and Crafts von Moris bis Mackintosh exhibition) Magazine article from: The Architectural Review; 3/1/1995; ; 700+ words ; ...reconsideration, for the last Grand Duke of Hesse, Ernst Ludwig, was a great admirer of the English...their work, with a studio block (the Ernst Ludwig Haus) and six artists' houses designed...glass and metalwork (now shown in the Ernst Ludwig Haus which has been turned into a ... Read more
	Expansion in Portland.(Current and coming)(Portland Art Museum)(Hesse: A Princely German Collection) Magazine article from: The Magazine Antiques; 10/1/2005; ; 700+ words ; ...in the century, largely under the enlightened patronage of Ernst Ludwig, landgraf von Hesse, the city of Darmstadt became a center...principles espoused by William Morris and his followers, Ernst Ludwig established an artist's colony outside the city. More recently... Read more
	Remembering Kirchner: denounced by the Nazis for his 'degenerate art" the troubled German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent his final decades in Swiss exile. Swiss News recalls that era in Davos through the eyes and ears of Kirchner's former neighbour.(PROFILE) Magazine article from: Swiss News; 10/1/2008; ; 700+ words ; Seventy years have passed since Barbara Augustin, then 16-year-old 'Babi' Ruesch, heard two pistol shots ring out near her family farmhouse in Davos-Frauenkirch. The shots of June 15, 1938 signalled the final desperate act of her distraught neighbour--suicide, by an acclaimed painter hounded by Read more
	Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck: (1858 -1947).(LETTERS TO PROGRESS IN PHYSICS) Magazine article from: Progress in Physics; 10/1/2007; ; 700+ words ; October 4th, 2007 marks the 60th anniversary of Planck's death. Planck was not only the father of Quantum Theory. He was also a man of profound moral and ethical values, with far reaching philosophical views. Though he lived a life of public acclaim for his discovery of the Blackbody radiation Read more
	Rebatiña por el arte. Magazine article from: Proceso; 12/24/2006; ; 700+ words ; ...las calles de Berlín, de Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a la nieta de un coleccionista...sin embargo, esa pintura de Ernst Ludwig Kirchner dejó de exponerse en las...Con obras de Kirchner, Max Ernst, Paul Klee y George Grosz... Read more
	Recollecting Paul Klee: condemned by the Nazis as a 'degenerate" painter Paul Klee fled Germany in 1933 to seek refuge in his boyhood home of Switzerland. Swiss News looks back at Klee's life and work, his artistic influences and his final years as a troubled exile in his adopted country.(PROFILE) Magazine article from: Swiss News; 11/1/2008; ; 700+ words ; ...reviews in life. When it seized power in 1933, Germany's Nazi Party castigated the art of Klee and his compatriot Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (profiled last month in Swiss News), who lived in exile in Davos. Nazi catalogues described an exhibit showcasing... Read more

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