Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Complete Story
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was the German Expressionist who painted modern city life as a beautiful kind of unease. His angular, electric scenes of Berlin streetwalkers, music halls and bathers pulse with clashing colour and nervous, jagged lines. He led Die Brucke, the group that lit the fuse of German Expressionism, and his own life was marked by the wounds of war.
His Berlin street scenes, all spikes and acid colour, are among the defining images of the modern city.
Born: Aschaffenburg, Germany, 1880
Known for: Die Brucke, jagged Berlin street scenes, Expressionist woodcuts
Died: Frauenkirch, Switzerland, 1938
The bridge to a new art
In 1905 in Dresden, Kirchner and a few friends founded Die Brucke, The Bridge, a brotherhood that wanted to bridge old art and a raw new future. They painted with hot, unnatural colour and deliberate roughness. See what is expressionism.
They revived the woodcut as a key Expressionist tool, carving stark, splintered prints that matched the urgency of their painting. See what is a woodcut.
The electric city
Kirchner's most famous works are his Berlin street scenes, painted around 1913. Elegant, masklike streetwalkers stand in acid greens and pinks, hemmed in by crowds and sharp diagonals.
The city looks glamorous and threatening at once, a place of energy and loneliness. Few painters have caught the nervous feel of modern urban life so well.
Bodies in the open
Like the rest of Die Brucke, Kirchner also painted nudes outdoors, bathers by lakes and in the studio, seeking a freer, more natural life away from city rules. See what is the nude in art.
These works mix tenderness with the same angular energy, the body rendered in flat, daring colour rather than smooth realism.
Common questions about Kirchner
What is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner famous for?
Leading Die Brucke and painting jagged, intense scenes of modern Berlin life.
What was Die Brucke?
The Bridge, the German Expressionist group he co founded in Dresden in 1905.
What happened to his work under the Nazis?
It was branded degenerate, and hundreds of his pieces were removed from German museums.
When did he die?
In 1938, in Switzerland, where he had settled after the First World War.
Why the jagged city still grips
Kirchner was broken by service in the First World War and spent his later years in the Swiss mountains, painting calmer scenes. His sharp Berlin of 1913 is what endures, the look of the modern city, exciting and anxious in the same breath.
One last detail. The Nazis included his work in their notorious degenerate art show, a deep blow to a man who had once defined German art. The country he helped lead into the modern age turned on him near the end.