Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938) was a German Expressionist painter and printmaker, and one of the founders of Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), the Dresden group that helped launch Expressionism in twentieth-century art. His paintings of city life, the nude and the Alpine landscape shaped European painting in the early decades of the century. Today the Kirchner Museum in Davos holds the largest collection of his work in the world.

Childhood and training

His father, a chemical engineer who worked on papermaking, was of Prussian descent, and his mother came from a family of Huguenots, an ancestry Kirchner often mentioned. The father’s search for work meant the family moved often. In 1890 Kirchner started school in Chemnitz, where he made his first woodcuts under his father’s guidance. On a school trip to Nuremberg in 1898 he saw printing blocks for early woodcuts at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and decided to become a painter. He later wrote that the experience had shaped his aim of renewing German art.

His parents supported his vocation but wanted him to finish a formal education. In 1901 he began studying architecture at the Polytechnic in Dresden, where he became close to Fritz Bleyl. Between 1903 and 1904 he studied in Munich, at the Polytechnic School and the Debschitz school, and in 1905 he returned to Dresden to take his degree and devote himself fully to painting.

Die Brücke in Dresden

In 1905 Kirchner founded Die Brücke with Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel. The name suggested a bridge between past and present. The group wanted to break with academic conventions and looked both to Dürer, Grünewald and Cranach and to the international avant-garde. From the Fauves, and from Gauguin and Van Gogh, they took the expressive, symbolic use of colour. They also revived the woodcut, a medieval technique, and its influence shows in their angular outlines, flat forms and unnatural, warm, subjective colour. Perspective was pushed into impossible foreshortening.

Their subjects were often unsettling: prostitutes, disreputable night venues and narrow streets peopled by strange figures. Kirchner’s studio, which Bleyl described as the lodging of a true bohemian, became the group’s meeting place. They used friends and acquaintances as models rather than professionals, and poses lasted only a quarter of an hour to encourage spontaneity. Their first group exhibition, in September and October 1906, focused on the female nude. From 1907 to 1911 Kirchner spent summers with other members at the Moritzburg lakes and on the island of Fehmarn, where the nude was set in natural landscapes. His main model in those years, the milliner Doris Große, posed for him until 1911.

Berlin and the end of the group

In 1911 he moved to Berlin with Max Pechstein to found a private art school, aiming to promote “modern teaching of painting”. It failed and closed the following year. In 1912 he began a relationship with the dancer Erna Schilling that lasted the rest of his life. In the capital he found material for his urban work: the restless energy of a modern metropolis, its streets and the world of street prostitution. He painted a series of “Straßenszenen”, street scenes with women waiting on corners and hurried passers-by, in a nervous style.

In 1913 the writing of his Chronik der Brücke led to the end of the group, and each member went his own way. That year his work was shown at the Armory Show in New York, and the Folkwang Museum in Essen gave him his first solo exhibition, which helped establish his own identity.

War and breakdown

When the First World War began in 1914 he volunteered, at the age of 35. In July 1915 he was sent to Halle to train as a driver in an artillery unit, but after a mental breakdown he was discharged without seeing combat. He then painted Self-Portrait as a Soldier, which shows him with his right hand severed, an image that struck those who saw it. In December 1915 he entered a sanatorium in Königstein, where he was diagnosed with alcoholism and dependence on Veronal. He kept working, and in 1916 sold a good number of works, but in December he suffered another breakdown and was admitted to a clinic in Berlin.

Davos

In 1917 Helene Spengler invited him to Davos, in Switzerland. His first stay lasted only ten days, because the exceptional cold sent him back to Berlin. Soon afterwards he returned for treatment under the lung specialist Lucius Spengler, who imposed strict rules that Kirchner tried to get around. In 1918 he was granted a residence permit and moved into a traditional house in the Grisons, whose rooms he decorated with furniture he carved himself. He wrote to Henry van de Velde that he lived in an old house with a kitchen that looked like Rembrandt’s studio. His health improved, although he remained dependent on morphine.

He came to know the local farmers, who were amazed by his gramophone, and he recorded his admiration for their careful work in his diary. He painted mostly mountain landscapes, interiors and everyday figures. Critics today rate this period below his Berlin years, although much of his maturity developed here. In 1921 he began designing carpets, which were woven by Lise Gujer. In 1923 he moved to the Wildboden house above Frauenkirch, which he called a turning point in his life. From 1925 his painting became more schematic.

Final years and degenerate art

In 1931 he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. After the Nazis took power in 1933, selling his paintings became impossible, and in 1937 he had to resign from the Academy. That same year his work was labelled “degenerate art”, and 25 of his 639 works were removed from German museums. Increasingly troubled, Kirchner worried about the destruction of German culture and about rumours of the persecution of Jews. He organised a large exhibition in Basel, which received mixed reviews. After the Anschluss he feared that Germany might invade Switzerland.

On 15 June 1938 he took his own life with a gunshot in front of his house in Frauenkirch, although some doubt has been raised about whether it was suicide. He was buried three days later in the Waldfriedhof cemetery. Erna Schilling continued to live in the house until her death in 1945.

Legacy

Kirchner is one of the central names of German Expressionism. His work, from the Dresden woodcuts to the Swiss landscapes, has been the subject of major exhibitions in the United States, London and Amsterdam, and many of his paintings are held in museums in Berlin, Munich, Madrid and Essen. His urban scenes, with the street and street prostitution as their setting, remain the most studied and most recognisable part of his output.