Product Description

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was a founder member and leading light of the group of modernist artists known as "Die Bruecke". This book traces his career.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1944508 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Customer Reviews

The psychological abandon and alienation of Ernst Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was the co-founder in 1905 of Die Brucke, a group of artsists who took German art to the edge of Modernism. Kirchner, a leading figure in the group proceeded to paint some of the finest scenes of pre-First World War city life, depicting in jagged expressive gauche the outcast and overcast of the Weimar Republic. We recognize prostitutes, men of repute and social stand-outs bedeviled by the vacuity of a surface galore. The outbreak of war plunged him into a profound crisis that destabilized his mental and physical self. Recovering in the swiss alps, near Davos, he retreated into exploring the mountain landscape and its Alpine community. In 1938 his art was dismissed as degenerate by the Nazi governing body, leading to a tragic and expiatory descet into alienation and eventually suicide. This study by Lucius Grisebach, the director of the Kunsthalle in Nuremberg is superb in defining the corollaries and dichotomies of an aesthetic sensitivity that had responded so arrestingly to the thrills of metropolitan life only to later find in the sublimity of the natural world a stage to encounter the stirring abyss of the more organic yet impassionately savage romantic life others had found idyllic. The world of Kirchner is one that craves the depths of the universe in every psychological temperament, caving into sensations and obsessions with a dissolution that would not condone the energy that it demanded of him. If one detects madness and unrest in Van Gogh one is liable to find in Kirchner the artist wondering why being human is such an impossible task, one only sufferable through the medium of art or the finality of death. Taschen reproduced this monograph with the usual lush exhaustive illustrations of most all paintings lithographs and drawings avalable, yet aside from a simple straighforward exploration of the balance and imbalace evidence in the artist's stages Grisebach fails to fully portray the psychological abandon Kirchner was haunted by, tha same condition of inadequacy and alination that led him to become one of the most important and colorful painters of the 20th century.