KIRCHNER, Ernst Ludwig, Featured Paintings in Detail (2)

KIRCHNER, Ernst Ludwig
Featured Paintings in Detail
(2)

Marzella
1909-1910
Oil on canvas, 76x 60 cm
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Marzella (detail)
1909-1910
Oil on canvas, 76x 60 cm
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Seated Girl (Fränzi Fehrmann)
1910 (altered 1920)
Oil on canvas, 35.88 x 31.75
cm
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

(detail)
1910 (altered 1920)
Oil on canvas, 35.88 x 31.75
cm
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Fränzi in front of a Carved Chair
1910
Oil on canvas. 71 x 49.5 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

(detail)
1910
Oil on canvas. 71 x 49.5 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Self-Portrait, Double Portrait
1914
Oil on canvas, 60 x49 cm
Staatliche Museen, Berlin

(detail)
1914
Oil on canvas, 60 x49 cm
Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Three Bathers
1913
Oil on canvas, 197.5 x 147.5 cm
Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney

Three Bathers (detail)
1913
Oil on canvas, 197.5 x 147.5 cm
Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney

Self-Portrait as a Soldier
1915
Oil on canvas, 69 x 61 cm
Allen Memorial Art Museum,
Ohio

(detail)
1915
Oil on canvas, 69 x 61 cm
Allen Memorial Art Museum,
Ohio

KIRCHNER, Ernst Ludwig, Featured Paintings in
Detail (2)
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Self-Portrait as a Soldier examines the psychological distress experienced by Kirchner during his service in the military. He was a reluctant soldier and soon became preoccupied with
avoiding service, and following a self-induced psychosis, aided by his use of alcohol and drugs, he was discharged. The painting displays a uniformed Kirchner standing in his studio,
smoking a cigarette. His right hand is severed, symbolizing his trauma and possibly also his anxiety of his loss of manhood; the motif is based on Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Bandaged
Ear (1889), a picture the artist painted after he too had inflicted injuries upon himself. In the background of Kirchner's picture stands a nude who bears a resemblance to his lover of the time,
Erna Schilling.

Marzella (detail)
Around the time this picture was painted Kirchner was spending time around the Moritzberg lakes, and the girl depicted is the daughter of a circus artiste's widow that he met there.
Emblematic of his Die Brucke phase, Marzella is a provocative depiction of a young, pre-pubescent girl. The youth of the figure coupled with the intense gaze and heavily made-up
face give the appearance of uncanny maturity. Unnatural colors and self-conscious body language add to the unease in the composition. The painting is an example of a technique
of rapid sketching used by members of Die Brucke, who believed this process allowed them to capture the "soul" of the subject. The picture is also indicative of the influence of
Edvard Munch on Kirchner's work, since the composition appears to be based on Munch's Puberty (1892).

In the early decades of twentieth-century Germany, a group of avant-garde artists known as Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1905-13), emerged. Hoping their work would serve as a bridge to the
art of the future, they developed a radical new style of painting called Expressionism. This composition, with its deliberate brushstrokes and forceful use of outline, articulates both Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner's and Die Brücke's intent to reveal raw emotion without apologies.
Lina Franziska Fehrmann (1900-1950), the adolescent model for Seated Girl, met Kirchner in 1910. She and her siblings regularly posed for artists in the Die Brücke group.

This portrait of a girl from the working-class district of Friedrichstadt in Dresden is one of the finest examples of the Expressionist style of the German group Die Brücke,
characterised by the simplification of form and the arbitrary use of colour. Here, Fränzi, who modelled for a number of portraits by Kirchner and other members of the group, sits on a
chair whose back has been carved into the shape of a naked woman. The girl stares defiantly at the viewer as the intense green of her face, defined by thick, unnaturalistic
brushstrokes, contrasts sharply with the pink flesh tones of the female figure that frames her. The frontal placing of the sitter suggests the influence of Munch, Van Gogh and
Gauguin, and also recalls Primitive art.

Kirchner painted to figures in this composition, himself and a girl. The expressionist style shows rapid brush strokes and bright colors. Flesh is green and mottled with orange, hair
is blue and spiked. The figures do not face each other, rather they are turned toward opposite sides of the picture plane.

Three Bathers
The nudes in 'Three bathers' resemble the artist's painted carvings, echoing in turn the sculpted Eves of medieval art as well as African and Pacific statuary. Wearing lipstick and a
look of enervation, these Berlin day-trippers huddle defensively in the Baltic waves. Uncannily presaging the coming blitzkrieg, the figures also predict the artist's own
deteriorating health. Conscripted in 1915, Kirchner was discharged six months later with tuberculosis.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a driving force in the Die Brücke group that flourished in Dresden and
Berlin before World War I, and he has come to be seen as one of the most talented and influential
of Germany's Expressionists. Motivated by the same anxieties that gripped the movement as a
whole - fears about humanity's place in the modern world, its lost feelings of spirituality and
authenticity - Kirchner had conflicting attitudes to the past and present.
An admirer of Albrecht Dürer, he revived the old art of woodblock printing, and saw himself in the
German tradition, yet he rejected academic styles and was inspired by the modern city.
After the war, illness drove him to settle in Davos, Switzerland, where he painted many landscapes,
and, ultimately, he found himself ostracized from mainstream German art. When the Nazis rose to
power in the early 1930s he was also a victim of their campaign against "Degenerate Art."
Depressed and ill, he eventually committed suicide.

KIRCHNER, Ernst Ludwig, Featured Paintings in Detail (2)

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