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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Aschaffenburg, 1880-Frauenkirch, 1938
The co-founder and principal artist of the Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge), Kirchner began to paint in a self-taught manner while he was studying architecture at the Techical Academy in Dresden where he obtained his diploma in 1905. In 1904 he moved temporarily to Munich where he worked in the studio of Wilhelm Debschitz and Hermann Obrist and learned about making woodcuts through the study of Dürer's prints. In June 1905, once more in Dresden, he took part-along with Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff-in the formation of the Die Brücke group. These artists shared their revolutionary ideas and worked in close collaboration, even though their exhibitions and publications did not achieve immediate recognition. Kirchner's interest in primitive art, which he looked at in the Ethnographic Museum in Dresden, is reflected in his work, as well as in the furniture and wall paintings which he created for the studio which he shared with Heckel in an old butcher's in the working-class quarter of Friedrichstadt. In October 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin where he painted his most important works and began to enjoy a certain degree of success which led to his inclusion in the Armory Show held in New York in 1913. As a result of their contacts with the Munich Expressionists, the Die Brücke artists were included in the Der blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition of 1912. Kirchner was called up in World War I, resulting in serious physical and mental health problems and he was invalided out of the Army in 1915, moving to Davos in the Swiss mountains where he lived in isolation for the rest of his life. In Switzerland he started to paint again and to write art criticism under the pseudonym of Louis de Marsalle. After the rise to power of the Nazi regime in Germany and the confiscation and destruction of his art, Kirchner once again suffered a severe attack of depression and committed suicide in 1938.
His work always deployed the typically Expressionist simplification and deformation of form and the random use of colour. Like the other Expressionist painters of the Die Brücke group, he developed from and early style which showed the influence of Van Gogh to a more compacted and two-dimensional one, with thick brushstrokes and a greater autonomy of colour. Kirchner's subject-matter was initially based on landscape, with or without figures, and on the nude, while later he depicted the bustle of the Berlin streets in some memorable works of 1912-1914. In Switzerland he once again painted landscape, this time emphasising its mystical aspect.
Gordon, D. E.: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Munich, 1968.
Grisebach, L.: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1880-1938. Cologne, 1995.
Grohmann, W.: Kirchner. New York, 1961.
Moeller, M. M.: Kirchner, Fränzi ante una silla tallada, 1910. Exhibition catalogue Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 1996.
Vergo, P.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Twentieth-century German Painting. London, 1992.
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