Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Prints

About Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in 1880 in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, the son of a chemical engineer who worked in papermaking. The family settled in Chemnitz in 1892, where he made his first woodcuts under his father's guidance. He studied architecture in Dresden from 1901, with a spell at art schools in Munich in 1903 and 1904, and took his diploma in 1905. That year he founded the artists' group Die Brücke with Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, to break with academic painting and revive older media such as the woodcut. Summers at the Moritzburg lakes and on the island of Fehmarn produced nudes in the open air. In 1911 he moved to Berlin, and after the group dissolved in 1913 he painted his series of Berlin street scenes. He volunteered for the army in 1914, suffered a breakdown and was discharged, and after time in sanatoriums settled near Davos in Switzerland in 1917, where the mountains and the farmers of the valley became his subjects. In 1937 the Nazis branded his work degenerate and more than 600 pieces were sold or destroyed; he died at Frauenkirch in June 1938. Kirchner's pictures use hard, angular drawing and unmixed, often acid colour, so a crowded street or a wrestling ring reads as movement and nervous energy rather than description.