Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, (born May 6, 1880, Aschaffenberg, Bavaria, Ger.—died June 15, 1938, near Davos, Switz.), German painter and printmaker who was one of the leaders of a group of Expressionist artists known as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). His mature style was highly personal and notable for its psychological tension and eroticism.

In 1898 Kirchner was impressed by the graphic art of the German late Gothic artists, especially Albrecht Dürer, whose influence on Kirchner was lifelong. But exposure to the Jugendstil movement and the dynamic art of the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch led Kirchner to simplify his forms and brighten his colours—a development aided by his discovery in 1904 of African and Polynesian art.

Between 1901 and 1905, Kirchner studied architecture intermittently in Dresden, Germany. However, he continued to be obsessed with painting, and in 1905 he founded Die Brücke with Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Other artists, including Emil Nolde, subsequently joined the group. For Kirchner, art was an immediate, powerful translation of inner conflict into visual terms. He cited the emotive work of Vincent van Gogh and Munch as artistic touchstones.

Kirchner’s use of colour for visual impact may be seen in Girl under Japanese Umbrella (1906) and Artist and His Model (1907), works that show a superficial affinity with the paintings of Henri Matisse and the Fauves in France. But the jagged outlines of Kirchner’s forms and the wary expressions of the faces create a threatening mood that is absent in Fauvist works.

Much of Kirchner’s work exhibits his preoccupation with malevolence and eroticism. In Street, Berlin (1907), the curvilinear rhythms of fashionable women on promenade accentuate the primitive sensuousness hidden beneath the panoply of fashion and propriety—a sensuousness rendered ominous by the savage, dark outlines of their figures and their masklike faces. His second version of Street, Berlin (1913) reinforces his sardonic view of Berlin’s jaded society. Kirchner’s studies of the nude, such as Bathers at Moritzburg (1908), are often explicitly erotic, and in his lithograph Head of a Man with a Nude (1908), his fantasy of sexual aggression reaches nightmarish intensity.

In 1911 the members of Die Brücke moved to Berlin, where Kirchner produced masterful woodcuts for Der Sturm, Germany’s leading avant-garde periodical before World War I. His illustrations for Adelbert von Chamisso’s novel Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1915; “Peter Schlemihl’s Wonderful Story”) and for the poem Umbra Vitae (1924) by the Expressionist poet Georg Heym are considered to be among the finest engravings of the 20th century.

After a mental and physical breakdown in 1915, Kirchner moved to Switzerland. His late landscapes are often allegorical, showing human beings unencumbered by civilization and at peace with nature. Kirchner endured long periods of depression, and after the Nazis declared his work “degenerate” in 1937, he committed suicide.