Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 1880-1938

One of the most prolific and creative of the German Expressionists, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) is noted for his mastery of the human form and the startling contrasts of pure color in his paintings. This gorgeous book--the first publication in English in 30 years on this leader of the Die Brucke movement--presents almost 150 of Kirchner's finest paintings, watercolors, prints, and sculptures, together with essays by leading scholars.

Of all the artists in the early modern period, Kirchner was most responsive to the underlying tension between nature and civilization that fascinated his generation. This preoccupation culminates in his paintings of metropolitan Berlin, where he combines elegance with fierce rawness to reveal the potential wildness of the crowd. His masterpieces from the years 1905 to 1915, his most important and innovative period, are the focus of this book and the exhibition it accompanies, opening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in March 2003.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1880-1938: On the Edge of the Abyss of Time (Taschen Basic Art)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. A retrospective exhibition

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Berlin Street Scene

Hand and Head: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's <i>Self-Portrait as Soldier</i> (The Discovery Series)

Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Self-Portrait as Soldier (1915) is one of the best-known self-portraits of the modern classical period. With its sharp foreground focus on the uniformed artist's bloody amputated hand, the painting has long been interpreted as a vehement protest against war, specifically World War I and Kirchner's participation in it. Peter Springer's innovative study presents a convincing alternative reading of Kirchner's epochal work. Springer sees in it, not a harsh condemnation of militarism, but a marked ambivalence in the artist's attitude toward war. This new reading of the painting grows out of Springer's assessment of its imagery in relation to patronage, gender relations, and national identity--and particularly to propaganda and satire.
Using Kirchner's letters and other documentation, much of it only recently available, Springer reconstructs the years of Kirchner's military service. He juxtaposes a range of visual contexts that include traditions of self-portraiture, depictions of prosthetic devices, and propaganda accounts of German soldiers hacking off the hands of Belgian and French children. He then considers Kirchner in relation to Albrecht Dürer and to theoretical arguments on the relative dominance of hand and mind in the pictorial arts that invoke the image of "Raphael without hands." Nearly 100 illustrations superbly complement the text.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 1880-1938 : Nationalgalerie Berlin, Staatl. Museen Preuss. Kulturbesitz, 29. November 1979-20. Januar 1980 : Haus d. Kunst Munchen, ... : Kunsthaus Zurich, 20. Juni-10. August 1980

Ernst Luwig Kirchner: Mountain Life: The Early Years in Davos 1917-1926

The German-born expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) first came to Davos in 1917 on a rest cure. His body and mind devastated by the war, mountain life promised recovery and proved extremely fruitful artistically. If at first Kirchner met his new environment with the same nervous brushstrokes and perspectivist escalations found in his Berlin street scenes, his inner turmoil soon subsided, producing calmer and stronger bands of pigment and later an exalted experience of nature. New imagery resulted as well, going beyond Kirchner's primary focus on landscapes to include interiors and a series of self-portraits and figure paintings of rural neighbors. With its selection of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, photographs and tapestry from European and American private collections, this monograph shows how Kirchner, after Segantini and Hodler, became the third great painter of the Alps. Life in the Mountains finishes with works from the years 1925-26, when Kirchner returned to Germany, leaving his union with the natural life behind.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Photographic Work

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the most important painters of the Expressionist movement, but he was also a skilled photographer who documented the era's main protagonists and milieu. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Photographic Work, compiled and edited by the Kirchner Museum Davos, is the first collection of his photographs, taken between 1908 and 1938. Brought together, they offer insight into the beginning of the modern age and all its contradictions, not least in the wild bohemian life of the artists, set alongside scenes of the intensely archaic Alpine world. Kirchner also attempted to portray the "model society" of contemporary artists through his portraits, including subjects such as Oskar Schlemmer, Hermann Scherer and Albert Mller; authors such as Theodor W. Bluth and Alfred Dablin; and collectors and patrons of the arts such as Carl Hagemann, Fr d ric Bauer and Botho Graef. The chronological sequence of images covers all the genres in which Kirchner worked as a photographer: self-portraits, individual and group portraits, nudes, scenes from his atelier, exhibition documentation, landscapes, installations and documentary photographs. The texts include an essay analyzing the historical and artistic context of this work and another on camera technique. The catalogue index contains formal descriptions of the photographs and their contents and an extensive register provides researchers easy access to information. A detailed biography, illustrated in part by previously unpublished photos, links the individual photographs to specific moments in Kirchner's life.

Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und der Untergang Preussens

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Drawings and Pastels