Biography of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg on May 6, 1880 and spent his youth in Chemnitz. In 1901, he began studying architecture, but in his free time continued to work on his art. He founded the artist group Die Brücke in 1905 with several fellow students also interested in art, including Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl. Their goal was to reach new shores in art and in life, to turn away from the art of the academy, which they found considered out of touch with the time, and to and find their own intuitive access to artistic creation. The group soon attracted other like-minded artists such as Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Mueller.

In the joint painting of nudes, in the studio and outdoors, the Brücke artists aspired towards an ideal of the primeval human being. Non-European art, which was on display in ethnological museums and featured in several publications of the period, also became a model for the artists. In the idea of combining art and life, the Brücke artists designed their studios as Gesamtkunstwerke with self-carved furniture and objects of everyday use as well as painted fabrics.

In 1911, all the Brücke artists moved their residence from subdued Dresden to the turbulent capital Berlin. Here the artists began to develop individual profiles: Kirchner in particular dived enthusiastically into rough and tumble urban life. He collected impressions and ideas from the city’s nightlife areas, visiting bars and music cafés and observing the nightly activities on the streets, always with a pen in hand. In the streetwalking prostitutes, seductive and threatening at the same time, he discovered an emblem for the alienation of modern man. To balance out this hectic life of the city, Kirchner spent his summer months on the Baltic island of Fehmarn, which became for him something of a South Sea paradise in the north.

In 1913, the Brücke dissolved, the ideas of the individual members had taken divergent paths. When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, Kirchner at first volunteered for army service. But already during basic training, psychological problems began to emerge, since he was forced to a abandon his self-conception as an artist in his new life as a solider. Several stays at sanatoriums followed, but Kirchner continued to suffer from anxiety and panic attacks. It was only when he was able to travel to the Swiss town of Davos for treatment, and thus escaping renewed conscription, that his health began to improve.

Kirchner settled permanently in Davos. In the two mountain cabins that he lived in, he once again designed living and workspaces and worked on designs for woven rugs and tapestries. He also received numerous visitors in his Alpine domicile. Under the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle, Kirchner published several texts on his artistic work.

Deeply hurt by the defamation of his art by the Nazis, especially in the Degenerate Art exhibitions held in 1937, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner took his own life in June 1938.

Janina Dahlmanns