Ernst Ludwig Kirchner ~ Portraits and Self-Portraits

Although Ernst Kirchner's father had encouraged Kirchner's love of art while he was growing up when it came time for a proper education and vocation, Kirchner was pointed to studying architecture at the Königliche Technische Hochschule in Dresden. He also enrolled in art classes and the first photo here shows him with four of his paintings on the veranda of his parents' home in Chemnitz, ca 1902.









This next photo is of Kirchner and Doris Grosse when they lived together in Dresden. In 1911, Dodo refused to move to Berlin with him. Many of the photographs of Dodo show her wearing hats as do most of the paintings that she sat for as a model. The hats are an indicator of her profession as a milliner.





Once in Berlin, Kirchner met up with the Schilling sisters, Erna and Gerda in June 1912. Both Erna and Gerda posed as models for Kirchner. Gerda dropped out of their lives about 1915. Kirchner lived with Erna for the rest of his life. They never married although at one point during the month of his suicide in 1938 they had taken out a marriage license and planned a ceremony that Kirchner cancelled. After his death, Erna petitioned the Swiss government to be allowed to use the name Kirchner which was granted. The last photo shows Kirchner and Erna in Berlin, ca. 1912-13.

Plans are for a video of Kirchner's self-portraits on this post. Stay tuned.

And here it is, self-portraits of Ernst Kirchner drinking, smoking (when didn't he?), standing calmly with a black cat, looking out at us quite abstractly...

Little Bits and Pieces of Kirchner

A self portrait of 1928.

Kirchner and Erna Schilling are lying on the bed, he is smiling. His students and models are in the foreground. This is a picture in his studio in 1915.

Here is a snippet I found on the web:

Theory of how one’s body mimics the art one loves. The heroically abstract body. The Kirchner body.

Theory of how one's body mimics the art one loves..... It's soft in places I wish it weren't, it doesn't get the attention it deserves, it is everything I have and yet I don't take care of it the way I should.

Another snippet from the web:
Expressionism remains the most influential twentieth century art because of its emphasis on self-expression in a society in which the self is at risk, as the Brücke artists recognized.

The self is at risk. When is the self not at risk?

From that same blog:
Cubism has become obsolete, but Expressionism has survived, constantly re-inventing itself, as shown by the American Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s, and the Berlin New Fauves ("Neue Wilden") and more broadly the New German Expressionism that emerged in the 1980s. This suggests that the self remains under siege in the modern world -- that emotional freedom, or what the historian Meyer Shapiro called "inner freedom," remains rare -- and that art must serve it with every means at its disposal. This gives art a sense of inner purpose -- what Kandinsky referred to as "inner necessity" -- which it loses once it has become totally pure. Purity dead-ends in sterility, as is clear from the Post-Painterly Abstraction -- really Post-Expressionistic Abstraction -- that Greenberg advocated in the 1960s, as the next "real" avant-garde step.

So what the writer is saying is, when the self accomplishes freedom in art this is pure, but as soon as it has occured it becomes lost, it can only be mimicked, it needs to be reinvented. Over and over. And Clement Greenberg, with his claim that cubism was a higher and more masterful attempt at pure art, was wrong, because this is a pattern and a set style and expressionism is not.

Kirchner was an addict and a depressive and an expressionist and a man whose sexuality boomed inside him, like a lot of men. The difference between De Brucke and Bleue Reiter is lack of female nudes in the latter. And Kirchner drank and his health failed him, of course, and the Nazi's infuriated him and he died by shooting himself twice at his home in Switzerland. This was after he burned much of his own work, and while his wife was home.

Artists, they never cease to amaze me.

Ernst Kirchner ~ Landscapes from Switzerland

In the post the other day, I mentioned the prevalence of the color blue in Ernst Kirchner's work. Winter Landscape by Moonlight is an oil that Kirchner painted in 1919. By some standards at almost four feet by four feet, it is quite large. The sky painted using red and yellow is almost a golden color filling the air with a warmth shown in those red trees on the blue slopes, the ever present blue. The painting is said to be a view from Kirchner's window in Davos where he moved after being in and out of sanatoriums for his physical and mental decline brought on after his brief time serving in World War I. Although his days are calmer in 1919, those clouds racing across the sky harken back to those hectic days spent in Berlin.

Somewhat later in the 20's Kirchner life and health returned. He remained in Switzerland and his art became calmer achieving a certain balance and composure that hadn't been there before. Landscapes were the focus of his work. His forms became more simplified and stylized. He collaborated with the weaver Lise Gujer during this period. He wrote in his diary of a new approach to painting: "I see a new way of painting becoming possible, with more independent planes, toward which I must already have always been steering. The new way of painting in more independent planes marks the beginning of the Wildboden style." He called this a "tapestry style" where the subject was built from individual areas of vivid color. Wildboden (shown just to the right) painted in 1927-28 reflects this new approach. Stylistically, the Portland Art Museum's Fir Trees falls somewhere in between.

Make Naked Art

Come girls, come boys;
Leave dank chambers, leave your toys,
And bathe, now, in the sun's bright light:
Drop quickly then your dull, dark rigs,
And let gray, wrinkled, jealous prigs
Avert dark eyes from your nude might.

Walter Ehrenfried's poem of 1904 embodies all the feelings of the Brucke artists. The expressionist movement celebrated the ennoblement of the human body and in looking through early work of Kirchner there is a lot of flesh and female nudes. Today at Maryhill I wandered the sculpture garden. There were many naked human forms standing in the shady grove above the Gorge. This is Quantam Man,

my favorite sculpture to date. There was also this red family, and a rolling yellow person, playful on the ground.

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.