KIRCHNER, Ernst Ludwig (Aschaffenburg, 1880 – Frauenkirch, 1938)
Kirchner was born in the German cathedral town of Aschaffenburg on 6 May 1880, the son of an engineer. As a boy, he showed an extraordinary facility for drawing, and in 1901 he enrolled as a student of Sächsische Technische Hochschule in Dresden, where he met Fritz Bleyl. Although he successfully completed his final examinations in Architecture, he devoted all his free time to drawing and painting, and in the winter of 1903 enrolled for two semesters at the private art school in Munich run by the Jugendstil artists Hermann Obrist and Wilhelm von Debschitz. He returned to Dresden and resumed his studies in 1904, where he became friends with his fellow architecture students Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In the summer of 1905, together with Bleyl, they founded the artists’ group Brücke, whose aim was to attract “all revolutionary, fomenting elements” in their struggle against the supremacy of the “comfortably established older generation.” Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Otto Mueller and the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet all joined the group over the next two or three years; Heckel became secretary of the organisation, responsible for a succession of group exhibitions throughout Germany.
Following in the footsteps of Pechstein, in the autumn of 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin. This period saw the continuation of his intense interest in primitive art, which had already attracted his attention during his last years in Dresden, but he also preoccupied himself increasingly with urban scenes, including “low-life” subjects such as cabaret artists and prostitutes, and with landscape. The latter was partly the product of his repeated visits to the Baltic island of Fehmarn, which he first visited in 1908, and where he returned during the summers of 1910 and again in 1912–14. In 1912 he and Heckel decorated a chapel which formed part of the international Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne; in 1913 the publication of his contentious Chronicle of the Brücke led to the break-up of the group, which by this date had been greatly weakened by internal dissension, including an ugly squabble which had already led to Pechstein’s expulsion.
Having volunteered for the army in 1914 and trained as an artilleryman, by 1915 a total mental and physical collapse led to Kirchner’s eventual discharge as unfit for military service. After a period spent in a sanatorium at Königstein/Taunus, where he executed a cycle of mural paintings, in 1917 he sought the advice of the lung specialist Dr. Lucius Spengler in Davos, Switzerland. Remaining in Switzerland until after the armistice, from 1918 onwards he occupied a farmer’s cottage above the village
of Frauenkirch; he was to remain in the vicinity of Davos and its environs for the rest of his life. During the 1920s, his work attracted increasing attention as a consequence of major exhibitions both in Germany and Switzerland, and also in the United States. His work of this period greatly influenced Swiss painters, including Albert Müller, belonging to the group Rot-Blau. However, during these later years Kirchner travelled himself abroad only twice, revisiting Germany at the beginning of 1926, and returning to Dresden in June, when he was able to see the Grosse Kunstausstellung staged in the Saxon capital that summer; he also sketched in the dance studios of Gret Palucca and Mary Wigman.
In 1933 the Prussian Academy of Arts, under pressure from the Nazi régime, demanded Kirchner’s resignation, which he refused to submit, vehemently defending his reputation as a German artist against accusations that his art was “degenerate.” Thereafter, however, he became increasingly depressed about the political situation in Germany, and fearful for his own safety and that of his work. He was also prone to recurrent and prolonged bouts of illness. On the early morning of June 15 in a sunlit field above Frauenkirch with the Swiss Alps as a backdrop, he committed suicide by shooting himself with his revolver.
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