ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER, his quotes on painting art and life + biography facts – leading artist in German Expressionism, Die Brücke / The Bridge
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938), his quotes on painting art and life by the leading painter-artist in German Expressionism in Berlin and Dresden + biography facts. Kirchner founded with fellow students the artist group Die Brücke / The Bridge in Dresden. They moved later to Berlin – where he painted his famous ‘Street scenes’ paintings – till 1915. Later it was Switzerland where Kirchner continued creating art till his death in 1938.
* At the bottom biography facts and life information & art links for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
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Kirchner: ‘Street scene Friedrichstrasse’ 1914 |
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, biography facts and his artist quotes on art & life in Die Brücke
– The struggle for existence is very difficult here (just moved from Dresden to Berlin, fh), but the possibilities are also greater. I hope that we can create a fruitful new school and convince many new friends of the value of our efforts.
* Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Louise Schiefler, 5 November 1911; as quoted in “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Grosstad, Eros und Natur, aus der verborgenen Sammlungen der Region”, Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst Germany, 2005, pp. 113-114
(German painter of Die Brücke / The Bridge and sculptor, famous for his colorful paintings, litho and sculpture; biography facts at the bottom)
– Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface.
* Ernst Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Botho Graef, 21 September 1916
– I am now like the cocottes, I once painted: the merest brushstroke now, gone tomorrow. Nonetheless I am still trying to put my thoughts in order and, from all the confusion, create an image of time, which is my task, after all (in the summer of 1915 he enlisted as voluntary in the army, fh)
* Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Gustav Schiefler, 12 November 1916; as quoted in “War, art and crisis: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1914 – 1918”, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 28.
– It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.
* source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to K.E. Osthaus, 23 December 1917; as quoted in “Kirchner and the berlin street”’, ed. Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, 2008, p. 36.
– Down there it’s still summer, I suppose, whereas our sun (in Switzerland, fh) is already gilding the mountains and the larches are turning yellow, but the colours are wonderful, like old, dark red satin. Down here in the valley the huts stand out in the strongest Paris blue against the yellow fields. Here one really learns the values of the individual colours for the first time. And the harsh, monumental lines of the mountains.
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Nele van de Velde, Frauenkirch, 13 October 1918; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 223-224.
– We Europeans have to toil to achieve it, at least as a transitional stage, for it is what we feed our dreams upon. These Orientals (from India, fh) have it in their blood, perhaps because they spend their lives I the sun. We poor wretched Europeans must sacrifice body and soul for even a shadow of it… …It is not a question of trying to reproduce objective features, only of good practice for the fingers and for the perceptive faculty, and that too is very useful. You must have read how Van Gogh was always getting his brother to send him drawings to copy. And how Rembrandt used to copy Indian an Italian pictures. Not of course, because they were short of material, but to get ‘du corps’. So one should be always drawing… …Oh, you’d love the Indians. The pure, Aryan Indians, not those one could see in Berlin, whose forms had become rigid and sterile through mingling with the Chinese.
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Nele van de Velde, Frauenkirch, 1919/20; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225.
– I am very happy and thankful to be ‘here’ (in Switzerland, fh) and to remain. Here I can at least work a little on my good days, and be at peace among these simple, kindly people. In this solitude I have fought my way through to the possibility of continuing to live, even suffering so much. My time for circuses, ‘cocottes’ and company is over (referring to his wild ‘Brücke’-years in Berlin, fh). I made what I could out of it, and I do not think it had been done in that way before. Otherwise there is nothing to link me with those ‘événements’. During my 7 years in Berlin I let the whole essence of that kind of thing seep into me so thoroughly that I now know it back to front, and can leave it. Now I have other tasks, and they lie here… …I can not go down again into the throng. I am more than ever afraid of crowds. But more still, my work here is only at the beginning of its possibilities.
* Ernst Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to architect Henry van de Velde, Frauenkirch, 5 July 1919; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225.
– They (his Street scene paintings and drawings, fh) originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: notebook entry ‘Meine Strasenbilder / My street scenes’, 24 Augustus 1919; as quoted in “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Meisterwerke der Druckgraphik”, M. M. Moeller, Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart 1990 p. 184.
– Many thanks for your letter and the Gauguin woodcuts… …One can see, incidentally, that Gauguin had Persian miniatures, Indian batik and Chinese art in his very blood. The shapes of the birds and the horse show that clearly. But although it looks very well, Gauguin can’t stimulate us present-day artists much. We need a direct route from life to plastic form. And we get it by perpetually drawing everything we see.
* Ernst Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Nele van de Velde, Frauenkirch, 29 November 1920; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225.
– You too, find release only in art, you are one of those privileged people who have that gift, and you will be free and at peace so long as you make use of it. Art gives us an inner superiority, for it has scope for every sensation of which human beings are capable, and first and foremost for love, which is the basis for knowledge. The artist loves without wanting to possess, and no one on earth can understand that except other artists, that is why other people think us mad.
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Nele van de Velde, Frauenkirch, 29 November 1920; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225.
– It would be interesting to get at a definition of the word “unhealthy”, as applied by certain people to anything new; it is particularly the fashion nowadays. I won’t try to answer the question of whether it is “healthier” to paint a nude with no breasts or behind if the fingers on the hands are defined, but from the artistic point of view it is necessary in any case. The spectator shows what sort of person he is, if he is shocked by such things.
* Ernst Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Nele van de Velde, Frauenkirch, 29 November 1920; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225.
– All art needs this visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds.
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: ‘Zeichnungen von E. L. Kirchner’, (written under pseudonym: Louis de Marsalle) E. L. Kirchner, Genius 2, Book 2, 1921, 216-234, reprinted by National Gallery, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 226.
– The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting (remark on printmaking, fh).
* source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: ‘Uber Kirchners Graphik’, (under pseudonym Louis deMarsalle) E. L. Kirchner, Genius 3, Book 2, 1922, 251-63, reprinted by National Gallery, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 226 ; as quoted in “Kirchner and the berlin street”’, ed. Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, 2008, p. 71.
– …the only certainty is that he (the artists, fh) creates from the forms of the visible world, however close or far from them he desires to or must come.
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: ‘Ein neuer Naturalismus? Eine Rundfrage des Kunstblatts’ in Das Kunstblatt 9, 1922, 375.
– …the feeling that pervades a city presented itself in the qualities of lines of force ( slight impact of the ideas of Futurism, intensively discussed in art publication ‘Der Sturm’ in Germany, fh)
* source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: diary entry ‘Das Werk’, 1925, in “E. L. Kirchner Davoser Tagebuch”, ed. Grisebach, p. 86.
– The beautiful, architectonically constructed, severely formed bodies of these women (his girlfriend in Berlin – and life companion – Erna with her sister Gerda, fh) replaced the soft Saxon physique.
* Ernst Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: unpublished manuscript ‘Die Arbeit E. L. Kirchners, by E. L. Kirchner 1925 –1926; as quoted in “Kirchner and the berlin street”’, ed. Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, 2008, p. 36.
– I begin with movement… …I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement…
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: unpublished manuscript ‘Die Arbeit E. L. Kirchners, by E. L. Kirchner 1925 –1926; as quoted in “Kirchner and the berlin street”’, ed. Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, 2008, p. 39.
– … how the movement of the passers-by (in his Street scene painting of 1913, fh) is comprehended in the rhombus of the heads which is twice repeated. In this way life and movement arise from an original geometric form. (a diagram is designed together with this line in the letter, fh)
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, source of his artist quotes on painting art, Brücke / Bridge and street scenes, Berlin: letter to Carl Hagemann, 27 February 1937; as quoted in ; as quoted in “Kirchner and the berlin street”’, ed. Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, 2008, p. 81 note 31 (German painter of Die Brücke / The Bridge and sculptor, famous for his colorful paintings, litho and sculpture; biography facts at the bottom)
not sourced artist quotes by the German painter artist Kirchner
– A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness; in fact he creates new appearances of things. (artist quote on things, Kirchner)
– The German artist creates out of his imagination, inner vision, the forms of visible nature are to him only a symbol. (artist quote on imagination in creating art by Ernst Kirchner)
– …whose way of life, home, and work was strange tot the normal person… …and was driven by the very naïve and pure need to bring life and art into harmony wit one another (describing his former Brücke friends in Berlin, fh)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , short biography information on the famous German artist, painter in Brücke / Bridge
Kirchner started in 1901 in Dresden his architectural studies; in 1905 he and his fellow students Bleyl, Heckel, and Schmidt Rotluff turned away from architecture and founded the artists group Brücke (Bridge). In 1909 Kirchner started woodcarving, in furniture and later wooden sculptures. He moved to Berlin in 1911 and started an art school with Pechstein as a source for income. He got a relation with his future life companion Erna Schilling.
In Berlin Kirchner was connected with the literary world, for instance with Döblin. A year later his paintings and prints participated in ‘Blaue Reiter’ exhibitions (Kandinsky, Franz Marc as leaders, fh) and were also published in the Blaue Reiter Almanac. When the war started in 1914 he was mentally very confused and afraid for being sent into battle; in the next year he enlisted as voluntary and become driver for artillery. After deep mental confusion he is hospitalized and in 1917 Kirchner goes to Davos in Switzerland for further treatment. There he stayed and worked till his death. In 1925 he returns to Berlin for some time; new series of Street scenes works generated. In the 1930s his work evolves towards an abstract-figurative style. In 1937 the Nazi’s confiscated 600 of his works, judged as ‘entartete Kunst’ (degenerated art). He ended his life in 1938.
Links for more information about the German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; Die Brücke / Bridge
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner & die Brücke, on Wikipedia
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