Ernst Ludwig Kirchner ~ Berlin to Switzerland, Style and Theme Changes

Berlin Street Scene is the one painting most people think of when they hear the name Ernst Kirchner. Painted in 1913-1914 it preceded Fir Trees by about twelve years. Much had happened in Kirchner's life when he painted this and much would soon happen to forever change the course of his life and work.

In 1911, Ernst Kirchner had left Dresden and moved to Berlin. He not only moved but he also left the woman he had been living with, Doris Grosse. Dodo had refused to move with him. It wasn't until the next year in June that he met Erna Schilling and her sister Gerda. They became the subject of his paintings much as Dodo had in Dresden. Gerda drops out of their lives in 1914; Erna and Ernst remain together until his suicide in 1938. Berlin Street Scene reflects the frantic pace of Kirchner's life and life in Berlin during this period. Elongated lines are used to depict all of his figures. Bold primary colors dominate.

Berlin Street Scene was part of "Street Scene", a series of painting of life in Berlin. Kirchner began this series in 1913, the year die Brucke was disbanded. In 1914, he completed Berlin Street Scene, but also felt compelled to join the artillery to avoid conscription in the army after World War I broke out. He asked to be a driver for the artillery but even this was too strenuous for him physically and mentally and he was discharged in 1915. For the next several years, Kirchner was in and out of sanitarioms in both Germany and Switzerland.

It was in Switzerland that Kirchner remained for the rest of his life. His life became calmer and that shows in his work.His brushstrokes broadened and his work centered on landscapes, bucolic, certainly more peaceful than the frantic Berlin life. His color palate involved bold primaries, but many times seemed predominately blue, the blue that links Berlin Street Scene and Fir Trees.

Man is a Bridge and Not an End

Nietzsche said "What is great in man is this: that he is a bridge and not an end."
The writer's words may have been one influencing factor on the early German expressionists calling themselves the Brucke- the Bridge. Of the four of them, Fritz Bleyl is the only one the Portland Art Museum has no work to represent. The Gordon Gilkey center has numerous woodblock prints by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and there are some impressive pieces by Erich Heckel as well, such as Young Girl of 1913, seen here.
The four of them set out to change things in Dresden by becoming a bridge from the past to the future. They began by working communally and sharing a studio, an idea they shared with William Morris, the British author and designer whose utopian philosophy appealed to the artists.
Kirchner said in the 1913 'Chronicle of the Artists' Group Brucke', "We were motivated by a totally naive pure need to bring art and life into harmony with each other."
Instead of a studio with models, people from all walks of life came to the shared space to hang out, and be themselves. The artists drew them as such, Kirchner wrote in a diary in 1925 "The studio became home for the people we drew. Life was absorbed directly and abundantly in drawings."
The earliest Kircher you can see at the Portland Art Museum, if it is on the wall when you visit, is Dancer with Raised Skirt of 1910.
Only 5 years into their collaboration and done in the same year as their first Dresden exhibition, the dancer represents Kirchner's new style. The artists had repeatedly visited the African and Oceanic collections of the city's museum 'fur Volkerkunde' around that time and were adopting a new vocabulary for themselves. In this woodcut of a cabaret dancer with her knickers showing I get a feeling for Kirchner's thick broad brushstrokes to come- as seen in the Tree, our piece of the week, painted 15 years later.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner ~ Fir Trees

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted Fir Trees in 1925. Kirchner is probably best known for having started the German group Die Brucke in 1905 with four others. Die Brücke promoted the freedom of artistic expression attempting to bridge the gap between traditional and contemporary art which in turn advanced the cause of  "Expressionist" art. Many people remember Kirchner's work from this period when he painted portraits, nudes, and street scenes as well as interiors of nightclubs. However, his art took a shift thematically when he was sent to Switzerland after having been discharged early from the military during World War I. Although Kirchner visited Berlin and other cities periodically before his death in 1938, he remained in Switzerland for twenty tree years, ultimately becoming a Swiss citizen in 1937. Surrounded by mountains and trees, these parts of nature became the focal point of his art. 

The trees here look to be part of a very cold environment – the blue enveloping the trees and the viewer with a chill. Lowering the temperature even more are the drifts of white, perhaps snow or ice filled clouds. Look carefully though and there seems to be some warmth coming through with the dark red of the lower parts of the tree and brighter red at the top.

At one point Fir Trees was part of a "tree triptych" on the first floor of the Portland Art Museum's Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. It was hung near Andre Derain's Pine Tree and Theo van Doesberg's very cubist Tree. Now it stand alone amongst the other examples of art from 1915 to 1940. It is almost directly across from Karl Hofer's Early Hour our piece of the week for Week 15 – two paintings that evoke a pensive mood for me and perhaps for Kirchner too. There are still six more days to this week to explore that thought.

Who Inspired Anna Crocker?

Anna B Crocker wasn't the first female curator at the Portland Art Museum. She is the successor to Henrietta Failing, daughter of founder Henry Failing. Crocker took Failing's position but she might remind one more of Julia Hoffman.
Lets start with Henrietta, who was the curator when the museum moved into its first location on 5th and Taylor, and out of the library where it had its beginning in 1892. Henrietta organized the first exhibition the Portland Art Museum ever had, it was a water color show. Failing went back and forth about whether she could include craft in the show because artist Frank Vincent Dumond, who was head of Lewis and Clark's art department and co-curator for the show, was adamantly opposed. He said there simply wasn't room and it would be absurd to mix the two up. Failing acquiesced, Dumond would have had a harder time if he'd been up against Julia Hoffman.
Craft as art was important to Julia Hoffman, who spent a great deal of time between the East and West coast art worlds. Hoffman urged Henrietta Failing to do a craft show in 1904, and shipped pieces from the Boston Society of Art and Craft exhibition, which she curated.
Hoffman who was always avid for her cause, wanted a two month workshop for Portland with one of the country's leading metal artist. When Henrietta Failing wired her that it wouldn't be possible for a number of reasons, Hoffman said "It will have to come if we want to keep pace with the rest of our country and it is too bad to have any delay."
Of course Hoffman got her way, in 1907 Mildred Watkins instructed a Summer School of Metalwork. That year, because of the inspiration of both the show Hoffman encouraged based on pieces borrowed from Portland Families and the Boston exhibition, and on the summer school of metal craft, the Art and Craft Society of Portland formed. To learn more see go read part of The Art and Craft Movement in the Pacific Northwest.
Anna Crocker followed Henrietta Failing as curator, but she seems to have had more of the Julia Hoffman fire inside her.
This is Julia Hoffman's self portrait. I cannot help but to think she must have been an inspiration to Anna B. Crocker.

Anna Crocker ~ An Homage and More Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is as much a signature piece for Marcel Duchamp as it is for Anna B. Crocker. Duchamp shocked the New York art world with it in early 1913 and Crocker did the same in November 1913 when she exhibited it at the Portland Art Museum. Almost like stop motion photography the nude traverses the painting leaving the viewer with a sense of how ephemeral time can be, an irreversible forward movement – unless of course you're John McCracken and time travel. Here's a piece of ekphrasis poetry in honor of the timeless nude. Following it is a Youtube video about Anna Crocker.

Nude Descending a Staircase by X. J. Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

Poem By Chad Sweeney, Fellow Duchamp Lover

The Sentence

The bones of Marcel Duchamp
laid end to end
reach all the way

to the bottom of this hill
where a little slab of concrete
bridges one

obscurity to another
and Mr. Duchamp seems pleased
the way I've places his jaw

in relation to the atlas
his wisdom teeth
commanding long sharp shadows

though it's noon
(the midnight of day)
and we've nowhere to go

and the oblique syntax of bones
repeats its inquiry
in the language of the world

This poem was published in the Best American Poetry 2008, chosen by guest editor Charles Wright. Chad Sweeney said "I wrote 'The Sentence' while staring at a bird marsh. I've always been intested in the communication between text and the plastic arts, and this image rippled mysteriously across the marsh- the bones of Marcel Duchamp stretched into a long sentence, as both lingual structure and sculpture, one of Duchamp's readymades pieced together from found objects. The drama takes place at noon, motionless noon crouched into negative capability, when the world is worlding, and forms pulse in a combination of protean grammar. Several months later I wrote about the bird marsh while staring at a junk yard."
If at first I thought I should draw a more complete correlation between this poem, and Anna Crocker, Sweeney tells me it doesn't need to be so. The Portland Art Museum has one of Duchamp's boxes, complete with miniature plastic and glass objects placed to signify his readymades. If ever you want to see one up close, while you stand under a Calder mobile, and read your Chad Sweeney.

Anna B. Crocker and Frank Lloyd Wright "Spot" Pietro Belluschi

Many visitors to the Portland Art Museum are astonished to hear that the main building was erected in 1932. The first comment they make is that it looks so modern. The second is the question "1932, how can that be? The country was knee deep in the Great Depression". It does seem that the stars were definitely aligned for the Portland Art Museum. Unemployment was high and new building in the city had come to an almost stand still. Fortunately for Portland and the museum, key patrons were still donating money to the museum. In 1930, the museum received a donation of $100,000 to be used towards a new facility. This would allow the Museum to have a permanent home. As generous as that donation was it would not have been sufficient without the forward thinking of Anna B. Crocker, the Curator and in effect director of the Museum.

The Museum approached A. E. Doyle with their proposal for a new building. After negotiations between the Doyle firm, the museum board and Anna Crocker, it was agreed that the the museum would pay no more than the $100,000 including architect's fees. Center to the proposal was Anna Crocker's well thought out guidelines for the museum. The interior space, lighting and comfort for the visitor were all to be considered before the design of the exterior. The exterior should be simple and approachable by the public.

But which architect at the Doyle firm should be selected? Pietro Belluschi, a young and yet untested architect, was Anna Crocker's choice. She knew him and his work from his days at the Portland Art Museum's School. Crocker approached C. F. Adams, the chairman of the building committee, and convinced him to back Belluschi as the choice. Without this support, the Doyle firm would have chosen Jamieson Parker, a more conservative architect and member of the museum's board. The overall design of the museum would have definitely been different, most likely leaning towards a Georgian exterior.

As it turned out even though the limited budget precluded the use of marble, colonnades, statues "and other monumental mausoleum accessories", the board members including Parker were insisting upon just that -- Georgian, what Belluschi thought of as dead tradition. Belluschi was caught between providing a traditional looking building and what Anna Crocker had made clear she wanted: "a welcoming, accessible, unpretentious, functional-looking building", also Belluschi's choice. Belluschi got his second "spot" from none other than Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright had just complected lectures at the University of Oregon so his name was in the news. Belluschi asked for and immediately received a letter from Wright that the museum would be "making a serious mistake" by insisting on a Georgian exterior. Belluschi proceeded to incorporate the minor changes Wright had suggested. Armed with the letter and amended proposal, Belluschi with Anna Crocker's support prevailed. The Portland Art Musuem has what Frank Lloyd Wright described as a sensible modern exterior that has moved gracefully into the 21st century.

Shown below are the floor plans for the museum as well as the Belluschi's preliminary drawing with Frank Lloyd Wright's comments. If you should like to read more about what transpired in the making of the Portland Art Museum, Meredith L. Clausen devotes about twenty pages to it in her book Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architiect.