KIRCHNER, ERNST LUDWIG

born May 6, 1880, Aschaffenberg, Bavaria died June 15, 1938, near Davos, Switz. German painter and printmaker, one of the leaders of a group of Expressionist artists known as Die Brcke (The Bridge; see Brcke, Die). His mature style was highly personal, notable for its psychological tension and eroticism. In 1898 Kirchner was impressed by the graphic art of the German late Gothic artists, especially Drer, whose influence on Kirchner was lifelong. But exposure to the Jugendstil movement and the dynamic art of the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch led Kirchner to simplify his forms and brighten his coloursa development aided by his discovery in 1904 of African and Polynesian art. Kirchner studied architecture intermittently in Dresden between 1901 and 1905. But he continued to be obsessed with painting, and in 1905 he founded Die Brcke with Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Other artists, including Emil Nolde, joined the group subsequently. For Kirchner, art was properly an immediate, powerful translation of inner conflict into visual terms. He cited the emotive work of van Gogh and Munch as artistic touchstones. Kirchner's use of colour for visual impact may be seen in Girl Under Japanese Umbrella (1906; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dsseldorf, Ger.) and Artist and His Model (1907, Kunsthalle, Hamburg), works showing a superficial affinity with the paintings of Matisse and the Fauves in France. But the jagged outlines of Kirchner's forms and the wary expressions of the faces create a threatening mood that is absent in Fauvist works. Much of Kirchner's work exhibits his preoccupation with malevolence and eroticism. In Street, Berlin (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), the curvilinear rhythms of fashionable women on promenade reflect their genteel grace, yet also accentuate the primitive sensuousness hidden beneath the panoply of fashion and proprietya sensuousness rendered ominous by the savage, dark outlines of their figures and their masklike faces. His second version of Street, Berlin (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) reinforces his sardonic view of Berlin's jaded society. His studies of the nude, such as Bathers at Moritzburg (1908; F. Bauer Collection, Etoy, Switz.), are often explicitly erotic, and in his lithograph Head of a Man with a Nude (1908), his fantasy of sexual aggression reaches nightmare intensity. In 1911 the members of Die Brcke moved to Berlin, where Kirchner produced masterful woodcuts for Der Sturm, Germany's leading avant-garde periodical before World War I. His illustrations for Adelbert von Chamisso's novel Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1915; Peter Schlemihl's Wonderful Story) and the poem Umbra Vitae (1924) by the Expressionist poet Georg Heym are considered among the finest engravings of the 20th century. After a mental and physical breakdown, Kirchner moved to Switzerland. His late landscapes are often allegorical, showing man unencumbered by civilization and at peace with nature. Kirchner endured long periods of depression, and, when the Nazis declared his work decadent, he committed suicide.