Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Retrospective
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Retrospective Details
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted city life as a joyous, bustling pageant, a sophisticated swirl of desiring bodies and colorful urbanity, giving Germany an energetic iconography for the glory days of modernity. One of the four founders of Die Brücke (The Bridge), Kirchner drew on German Renaissance art to conjure expressive exaggerations of face and posture, and brought to landscape painting a city-dweller's zest, imbuing tranquil scenery with riotous energy. Coinciding with a Kirchner retrospective at the Städel Museum--the first to be seen in Germany in 30 years--this massive volume surveys the artist's several creative phases and genres. It features the famous nudes made during the Die Brücke era, his classic scenes of frenetic Berlin city life and Swiss mountainscapes from Davos, along with lesser-known canvases, works on paper and sculpture. With essays by renowned art historians, this definitive monograph offers fresh perspective on the continued relevance of Kirchner.Born in Bavaria, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) studied architecture in Dresden, where he met the young painter Fritz Beyl. With Beyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, Kirchner founded the group known as Die Brücke. Casting aside the then-prevalent academic style of painting, Kirchner and his friends allied themselves with early Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Cranach the Elder, and revived older media such as woodcut printing. Kirchner briefly saw army service in the First World War, but suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged. In the interbellum years Kirchner's reputation grew enormously, until the Nazi regime branded his art degenerate: in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. In 1938, despairing of this destruction and the general political climate, Kirchner committed suicide.
Reviews
Over the last couple of years there have been several high-quality publications centered on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and this book comes as a valuable addition to them. It is the catalogue for the retrospective that was held until July 2010 at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany,and it follows a rather classic chronological pattern, describing the early years, then the Dresden , the Berlin, the war and the Davos periods. That last period is marked by the appearance of a "new style", characterized by "blocks of color that are frequently outlined" and which lead to a "much more abstract idiom", a "departure from both the expressive and the figurative". As far as this later style is concerned, the authors cannot help admitting that it is still considered uneven, if not weak, when compared to the great expressionist compositions of the 1910's and one is tempted to agree with this remark (a 1932-1934 work such as Color Dance II, illustrated on page 200, pales when compared to Picasso's output of the same period; the 1928-33 portrait of Dr. Carl Hagemann looks like a wan version of Otto Dix's great "New Objectivity" portraits which are contemporary to it).Now,whatever the doubts one might nourish on the quality of Kirchner's late output, this book is probably the best and most complete on the German painter and it is also a pleasant read, since it tackles a previously unstudied theme: the representation of couples in the artist's oeuvre, based on the study of an unusual and fascinating drawing from a 1927 sketchbook.The quality of the reproductions is first-rate, which is often the case with Hatje Cantz publications.
