Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Kirchner, seminal expressionist painter and founding member of the influential artists' collective Die Brücke, came to the Swiss mountains during World War I to recuperate from a nervous breakdown.Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and his Friends is the first book to explore how Kirchner became a role model, teacher, and mentor for younger artists during his time in Davos. The momentous artistic exchange between Kirchner and his young admirers--whose ranks included the German Philipp Bauknecht, the Dutch Jan Wiegers, and the members of the Swiss Gruppe Rot-Blau--established a dialogue that had a formative influence on the direction of European art in the twentieth century. This matchless volume provides a record of the extraordinary bond that developed between a legendary--yet ailing--artist and the up-and-coming Gruppe Rot-Blaue in Switzerland.

An introduction to the German Expressionist painter, graphic artist and sculptor who, at the turn of the 19th century, was Germany's most influential artist.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) is one of the best-known painters and sculptors of German Expressionism. As co-founder of the artists' group the Brücke at the beginning of the twentieth century, he is also one of the most important artists of the avant-garde. His life and work were deeply shaped by his search for the 'exotic' and 'primordial', for foreign lands and cultures. What resulted were brilliantly colourful, imaginative artworks in which he create foreign worlds. This book traces the stages of Kirchner's life and artistic development. It illustrates how, by synthesising a great variety of influences from non-European cultures, the artists achieved an intermingling of art, life and work that manifested itself as 'exotic' Gesamtkunstwerk not only in his work but also in his live-in studios.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's remarkable series of paintings known as the Berlin Street Scenes is a highpoint of the artist's work and a milestone of German Expressionism, widely seen as a metaphor for modernity itself through their depiction of life in a major metropolis. Kirchner moved from Dresden to Berlin in 1911, and it was in this teeming city, immersed in its vitality, decadence and underlying sense of danger posed by the imminent World War I, that he created the Street Scenes in a sustained burst of creative energy and ambition between 1913 and 1915. As the most extensive consideration of these paintings in English, this richly illustrated volume examines the creative process undertaken by the artist as he explores his theme through various mediums, and presents the major body of related charcoal drawings, pen-and-ink studies, pastels, etchings, woodcuts and lithographs he created in addition to the paintings. The volume also investigates the significance of the streetwalker as a primary motif, and provides insight on the series in the context of Kirchner's wider oeuvre.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted city life as a joyous, bustling pageant, a sophisticated swirl of desiring bodies and colorful urbanity, giving Germany an energetic iconography for the glory days of modernity. One of the four founders of Die Brücke (The Bridge), Kirchner drew on German Renaissance art to conjure expressive exaggerations of face and posture, and brought to landscape painting a city-dweller's zest, imbuing tranquil scenery with riotous energy. Coinciding with a Kirchner retrospective at the Städel Museum--the first to be seen in Germany in 30 years--this massive volume surveys the artist's several creative phases and genres. It features the famous nudes made during the Die Brücke era, his classic scenes of frenetic Berlin city life and Swiss mountainscapes from Davos, along with lesser-known canvases, works on paper and sculpture. With essays by renowned art historians, this definitive monograph offers fresh perspective on the continued relevance of Kirchner. Born in Bavaria, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) studied architecture in Dresden, where he met the young painter Fritz Beyl. With Beyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, Kirchner founded the group known as Die Brücke. Casting aside the then-prevalent academic style of painting, Kirchner and his friends allied themselves with early Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Cranach the Elder, and revived older media such as woodcut printing. Kirchner briefly saw army service in the First World War, but suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged. In the interbellum years Kirchner's reputation grew enormously, until the Nazi regime branded his art degenerate: in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. In 1938, despairing of this destruction and the general political climate, Kirchner committed suicide.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the most important painters of the Expressionist movement, but he was also a skilled photographer who documented the era's main protagonists and milieu. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Photographic Work, compiled and edited by the Kirchner Museum Davos, is the first collection of his photographs, taken between 1908 and 1938. Brought together, they offer insight into the beginning of the modern age and all its contradictions, not least in the wild bohemian life of the artists, set alongside scenes of the intensely archaic Alpine world. Kirchner also attempted to portray the "model society" of contemporary artists through his portraits, including subjects such as Oskar Schlemmer, Hermann Scherer and Albert Mller; authors such as Theodor W. Bluth and Alfred Dàblin; and collectors and patrons of the arts such as Carl Hagemann, Fr»d»ric Bauer and Botho Graef. The chronological sequence of images covers all the genres in which Kirchner worked as a photographer: self-portraits, individual and group portraits, nudes, scenes from his atelier, exhibition documentation, landscapes, installations and documentary photographs. The texts include an essay analyzing the historical and artistic context of this work and another on camera technique. The catalogue index contains formal descriptions of the photographs and their contents and an extensive register provides researchers easy access to information. A detailed biography, illustrated in part by previously unpublished photos, links the individual photographs to specific moments in Kirchner's life.

Springer sees in it, not a harsh condemnation of militarism, but a marked ambivalence in the artist's attitude toward war. This new reading of the painting grows out of Springer's assessment of its imagery in relation to patronage, gender relations, and national identity - and particularly to propaganda and satire. Using Kirchner's letters and other documentation, much of it only recently available, Springer reconstructs the years of Kirchner's military service.