Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the most important artists of the early 20th century, was born on May 6, 1880, in Aschaffenburg, Germany. He is most famous for being one of the principal players of the exciting, occasionally disturbing artistic movement that came to be known as Expressionism. Like Vincent van Gogh and his idol Edvard Munch, Kirchner was a great innovator with color and line, introducing daring new techniques in brushwork and a new boldness in color and form that imbued his work with an enthralling sense of dynamism. Kirchner transitioned away from Expressionism following World War I, and his post-Expressionistic phase is in many ways equally as interesting.
“Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,” on display at Manhattan’s Neue Galerie through Jan. 13, presents a range of the artist’s work from each of the main stages of his career — from his early years in Dresden to his Berlin phase, interwar period, and final years in the Swiss Alps — along with a special room dedicated to his prints. (Kirchner, a devotee of the great German Renaissance printmaker Albrecht Dürer, was also a highly prolific and inventive printmaker.)
Kirchner was a fascinating and complex man. In many of the photos taken of him, he appears rather staid and proper, but he and his friends led a wild bohemian life, drinking and carousing and running around naked. “On the one hand,” says Jill Lloyd, an expert on Expressionism and the co-curator of the exhibit, Kirchner “was very raw, very emotional and direct. And on the other hand, he’s very sophisticated and intellectual.” These two clashing characteristics come together in his work, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes discordantly, and give his paintings a very particular kind of energy.
Energy is indeed the operative word when it comes to Kirchner’s work. His colors are vivid, hallucinogenic, alive. Although Kirchner’s work tends to be grouped with the paintings of Munch, Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, and Oskar Kokoschka, as a colorist he was on par with Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. Several of his early works on display in this retrospective are positively Matisse-like, such as “The Toilette” (1913), which depicts his lover Erna Schilling, “Woman with Black Stockings” (1909), and “Girl in White Chemise” (1914), in which the blank whiteness of the girl’s dress contrasts with the deep reds, effervescent oranges, mint-greens, steel grays, and soft pinks of the bed on which she lies.
Aside from energy and color, the predominant feature of Kirchner’s art is women. Kirchner loved to paint women, both clothed — like Renoir, he was a keen observer of women’s fashion — and unclothed. The nude was an important subject for many Expressionists but particularly so for Kirchner. He wanted to liberate the body from the prudishness of German bourgeois society, and painting nudes was his method of doing so. Kirchner’s nudes are not Venuses or Dianas or traditional mythological nudes; they’re paintings of young women in Kirchner’s friendship circle. In this respect, Kirchner adhered to the precedent set by his other idol, Rembrandt, choosing to paint not gods and goddesses but ordinary people.
“Six Dancers” (1911) offers an illuminating example of the way Kirchner diverged from the artistic generation preceding him. Like the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, Kirchner was fond of painting the female dancers he would see at cabarets and circuses. Yet whereas Degas depicted his dancers realistically, Kirchner painted his entirely in pink — not only their tutus, but their faces and bodies as well. In fact, the entire coloration of “Six Dancers” is strikingly unrealistic, with the pink dancers set against an unusual gray-blue backdrop and a jarringly orange floor. Unlike the Impressionists, who sought to depict the outer world, Kirchner and his fellow Expressionists used color to convey inner emotional states.
In 1905, Kirchner, along with his German-speaking artist friends, co-founded the group Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). Kirchner and his colleagues envisioned Die Brücke as not only a school of art but a way of life. They promoted an unconventional bohemian lifestyle, living with multiple partners and often drawing them in the nude. The group managed to hold shows in Dresden, Hagen, Munich, and other German and Austrian cities before disbanding in 1913. But while Die Brücke was short-lived, it proved highly influential in the development of modern art, aided by a high-profile exhibition of the group’s work in New York that same year.
Many consider Kirchner’s “Street” paintings, painted while the artist was living in Dresden and Berlin before the war, to be the high point of his career. In these works, the shadowy, pointed brushstrokes fuse with the strident pinks and blues to create lively canvases that capture the energy of modern city life. Kirchner, who grew up in a small town in southern Germany, was fascinated by the dynamism of the big city — the glamorous architecture and the risqué nightclubs, the fashionably dressed men and the even more fashionably dressed women, the spectacle of the cities’ new electric lights — and sought to capture as much of it as he could on the canvas. This retrospective is unfortunately missing his “Street, Dresden” (1908), but it does have “Street, Berlin” (1913), allowing us to glimpse, and feel, some of the excitement that Kirchner felt for the metropolis.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Kirchner volunteered for military service with the German army but suffered a nervous breakdown during training. He was terrified of losing his identity as an artist and becoming just another cog in the German war machine. He drank to excess, smoked heavily, and became addicted to sleeping pills and morphine. He made matters worse by starving himself. The problems he developed during the war years never entirely went away, even after stays at various European sanatoriums.
Kirchner’s experience during the war led him to move to Davos in 1918, in the hopes that the light and air of the Swiss Alps would calm his body and soothe his soul. He stayed until 1925, producing some of his most astounding (and overlooked) paintings. The Neue Galerie justly displays the Davos paintings in a room of their own. These landscapes are enrapturing, with the quality of images out of a fable. These paintings, which lack the luridness of his cityscapes and wartime paintings, are among the most beautiful works of art produced in the 20th century.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York featured several of Kirchner’s paintings in a 1931 exhibition on German art, bringing the artist even greater global recognition. Back in his native Germany, however, his work was branded as “degenerate” by the Nazis, and more than 600 of his paintings were seized from German museums. Adding insult to injury, in 1937 Kirchner was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts.
“The world breaks everyone,” wrote Hemingway, “and afterward some are strong at the broken places.” Some, but not all. After the world broke Kirchner, he could never quite regain his former strength. In 1938, following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria and with the Wehrmacht encamped near the Swiss border, the paranoid Kirchner shot himself at the age of 58. He is buried in Davos.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer, an ordained rabbi, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He has written for The Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, among other publications.
