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(b Aschaffenburg, 6 May 1880; d Frauenkirch, 15 June 1938). German painter, printmaker and sculptor. He is one of the most important representatives of Expressionism (see EXPRESSIONISM,
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| Biography: 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.
Further Reading
Donald E. Gordon collected vast amounts of documentary material and corrected inaccurate datings in his monograph Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1968). The prints are cataloged in Annemarie Dube-Heyning, Kirchner: His Graphic Art (1966).
| Photography Encyclopedia: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner |
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig (1880-1938). Though known primarily as a German Expressionist painter and co-founder of the group Die Brücke, throughout his career Kirchner also produced drawings, prints, sculpture, and—discovered much later—photographs. He was always exceptionally deliberate and energetic about promoting the work he admired, including his own, to the point of later writing supportive criticism under the pen name L. de Marsalle. His photographs seem to have served various purposes, including recording his bohemian life with friends and models, but they were usually used as a means of promotion.
— Nancy RothNancy Roth
Bibliography
| German Literature Companion: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner |
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig (Aschaffenburg, 1880-1938, Frauenkirch nr. Davos), a sculptor, draughtsman, and painter and co-founder of Die Brücke. His early Expressionism later gave way to abstract conceptions. Under the National Socialist regime his work was regarded as ‘degenerate’ (see Entartete Kunst) and was impounded. He took his own life.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner |
Bibliography
See biographical study by D. E. Gordon (1968).
| Wikipedia: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner |
| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner | |
 Photographic self-portrait 1919 |
|
| Birth name | Ernst Ludwig Kirchner |
| Born | May 6, 1880 Aschaffenburg |
| Died | June 15, 1938 (aged 58) |
| Nationality | German |
| Field | Painting |
| Training | Königliche Technische Hochschule |
| Movement | Expressionism |
| Works | Marzella, 1909-1910 |
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. In 1933, his work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis and in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. In 1938 he committed suicide.
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria.[1] In 1901, he began studying architecture at the Königliche Technische Hochschule (technical university) of Dresden. The institution provided a wide range of studies in addition to architecture, such as freehand drawing, perspective drawing and the historical study of art.[2] He became close friends there with Fritz Bleyl, whom he met during the first term.[3] They discussed art together and also studied nature,[3] having a radical outlook in common.[4] Kirchner continued studies in Munich 1903–1904, returning to Dresden in 1905 to complete his degree.[1]
In 1905, Kirchner, along with Bleyl and two other architecture students, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, founded the artists group Die Brücke ("The Bridge"). From then on, he committed himself to art.[1] 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.[4] 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.[4] As part of the affirmation of their national heritage, they revived older media, particularly woodcut prints.[4]
Their group was one of the seminal ones, which in due course had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism.[5] The group met initially in Kirchner's first studio, which had previously been a butcher's shop. Bleyl described it as:
| “ | that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist’s materials — much more like an artist’s romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student.[4] | ” |
Kirchner's studio became a venue which overthrew social conventions to allow casual love-making and frequent nudity.[4] Group life-drawing sessions took place using models from the social circle, rather than professionals, and choosing quarter-hour poses to encourage spontaneity.[4] 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."[6]
The group composed a manifesto (mostly Kirchner's work), which was carved on wood and asserted a new generation, "who want freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces."[4]
In September and October 1906, the first group exhibition was held, focused on the female nude, in the showroom of K.F.M. Seifert and Co. in Dresden.[6]
In 1906, he met Doris Große, who was his favoured model until 1911.[1] Between 1907 and 1911, he stayed during the summer at the Moritzburg lakes and on the island of Fehmarn (which he revisited until 1914) with other Brücke members; his work featured the female nude in natural settings.[1] In 1911, he moved to Berlin, where he founded a private art school, MIUM-Institut, in collaboration with Max Pechstein with the aim of promulgating "Moderner Unterricht im Malen" (modern teaching of painting). This was not a success and closed the following year, when he also began a relationship with Erna Schilling that lasted the rest of his life.[1]
In 1913, his writing of Chronik der Brücke (Brücke chronicle) led to the ending of the group. At this time, he established an individual identity with his first solo exhibition, which took place at the Essen Folkwang Museum.[1] During the next two years, he painted a series of "Großstadtbilder" (metropole pictures) showing the streets of Berlin,[1] with the central characters of street walkers.
At the onset of the First World War in September 1914, Kirchner volunteered for military service, but suffered a nervous breakdown in 1915 and was discharged, recovering for the next two years in sanatoriums in Taunus and Davos, Switzerland.[1]
In a self portrait in 1915, he depicted himself with an amputated hand (this did not actually happen). In 1918, he settled in Davos, living in a farm house in the Alps; from this time onwards his main subject matter was mountain scenes.[1] On 3 July 1919, he wrote in a letter from Davos, "Dear Van de Velde writes today that I ought to return to modern life. For me this is out of the question. Nor do I regret it.... The delights the world affords are the same everywhere, differing only in their outer forms. Here one learns how to see further and go deeper than in 'modern' life, which is generally so very much more superficial despite its wealth of outer forms."[7]
His reputation grew with several exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland in 1920.[1] In 1923, he moved to Frauenkirch-Wildboden.[1] The art gallery in Basel staged a substantial exhibition, which led to the foundation of the "Rot-Blau" (red and blue) artists association by Swiss painters, Paul Camenisch, Albert Müller and Hermann Scherer.[1] Kirchner made his final visit to Germany 1925–1926. His reputation grew through the rest of the decade with a monograph and the first part of a catalogue raisonné of his graphics in 1926, a mural commission by the Folkwang museum in 1927, and a presence at the Venice Biennale in 1928; he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1931.[1]
In 1933, Kirchner was labelled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis and asked for his resignation from the Berlin Academy of Arts; in 1937, over 600 of his works were confiscated from public museums in Germany and were sold or destroyed.[8] In 1938, the psychological trauma of these events, along with the Nazi occupation of Austria, close to his home, led to his suicide.[8]
In 1913, the first public showing of Kirchner's work took place at the Armory Show, which was also the first major display of modern art in America.[8] In 1921, U.S. museums began to acquire his work and did so increasingly thereafter.[8] His first solo museum show in the US was at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1937.[8] In 1992, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, held a monographic show, using its existing collection; a major international loan exhibition took place in 2003.[8] In November 2006 at Christie's, Kirchner's Street Scene, Berlin (1913) fetched $38 million, a record for the artist.[9] In 2008 (August 3 - November 10), the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a major exhibition that "probably comprises the very best of his oeuvre."[10]
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 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Photography Encyclopedia. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| German Literature Companion. The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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