Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
The leader of Die Brücke.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner founded the Expressionist group Die Brücke in Dresden in 1905. His Berlin street scenes are nervous and angular.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in 1880 in Aschaffenburg in Germany. He studied architecture in Dresden but really wanted to be an artist. In 1905, together with his fellow students Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, he founded the group Die Brücke, The Bridge. The name referred to their wish to build a bridge to a new art.
The group was influenced by van Gogh, Munch and the colours of the Fauves, and by art from Africa and Oceania that they saw in ethnographic museums. They painted in strong, unmixed colours with coarse brushstrokes. Kirchner also cut many woodcuts, reviving an old German tradition with angular forms and sharp contrasts. In summer the group painted nude models outdoors by the lakes outside Dresden.
In 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin. There he painted his best-known series, the street scenes of 1913–1915. They show elegantly dressed women and men moving along crowded pavements, with elongated bodies, pointed forms and acid colours. The pictures convey the bustle and unease of the metropolis. Potsdamer Platz of 1914 is in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Die Brücke was dissolved in 1913, partly after a dispute over a chronicle Kirchner had written of the group’s history.
During the First World War he enlisted but suffered a mental breakdown. After stays in sanatoriums he moved to Switzerland in 1917 and settled near Davos with his companion Erna Schilling. There he painted mountain farmers and Alpine landscapes in a calmer style, and in the 1920s he was a well-regarded artist.
The Nazis branded his art “degenerate”, and more than six hundred of his works were confiscated from German museums. He took his own life in June 1938. Today there is a museum devoted to him in Davos, and he is regarded as one of the most significant artists of German Expressionism.