Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (it. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 6 may 1880, Aschaffenburg, Germany – June 15, 1938, Frauenkirch-Waldboden, Switzerland) – German artist-expressionist, founder of avant-garde Association "Bridge", the first Association declared the principles of expressionism.

Features of the artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: a modern city in the paintings of Kirchner is a dangerous, dirty, risky, dirty. It is a city of loneliness and despair, the city in which the trajectory paths of the pedestrians do not intersect, and the views slide past each other. Distorted perspective of streets and squares makes buildings, people, trams to dybitsya, unnatural artificial light of the city at night distorts the face and color. The sense of danger is erased only in the later landscapes Kirchner, written in Switzerland, but it is still mystical, tragic world, and the shifting is the same lonely as a big city.

Famous paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: "Street scene", "Self-portrait in uniform", "Potsdamer Platz", "Reclining Nude before a mirror", "Winter landscape in moonlight".

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner founded the art Association "Bridge" with three friends. It was the first avant-garde group of artists, formed and otpechatky own Manifesto in the form of engravings. They announced break with academic art and the beginning of a Grand building – a virtual bridge from the medieval, Gothic art directly into the present, from Durerand Cranach the elderbypassing has long been a lifeless academic tradition to their own search for a new language in painting.

At the time of the creation of a "Bridge" Ernst Kirchner was 25 years old, he finished studying at the Higher technical school of Dresden to be an architect, so thoroughly studied yet, and perspective and drawing. In the Dresden workshop of Kirchner hosted the first meeting of the group: Fritz Bleile, Karl Schmidt-Rotlufa and Erich Heckel. These four came up with a nudist retreat open air. They went to the island of Fehmarn or Moritzburg lake, went skinny-dipping with his models and mistresses, did gymnastics on the beach and wrote a lot of Nudes. In the cult of the wild, barbaric way of life, of course, played a big role Ethnographic museums, which then just start to open in Germany: masks, idols, utensils from Oceania, Africa and Asia. This provincial young Dresden period is the happiest for Kirchner.

In 1911, the artist moved to Berlin, a bustling, fast, hectic, ruthless. Here for Kirchner quickly things change: private art school that I believed the participants of the "Bridge", special success have not used and closed a year after opening, each of the four friends-artists, inspired by the possibilities of the metropolis, is removed from the other to find their own way and style. Two years later, the group was disbanded. Lonely and confused, Kirchner spends his evenings on the streets, drawing dozens of sketches, trying to catch the rhythm of the city, breathes its electrified, anxious air, watching the flashing heels of passersby, prostitutes, and thieves, dealers and thugs. The pre-war doom and nervous waiting for the inevitable.

In September 1914, Kirchner volunteered for the war, it is taken by the driver in an artillery regiment. In 1915, the painter will come back to Berlin, retired from the army with severe mental disorder: the attacks were so strong that it led to the paralysis of arms and legs. Morphine, alcohol, sanatorium in Switzerland, scary dreams and scary self-portraits. It would take years to post-war psychosis had subsided, and the doses of morphine persistent doctors were able at least to reduce to an acceptable. Months of treatment from a nervous breakdown, recurrent pain and paralysis interspersed with the weeks rather successful exhibitions and first financial success. Erna Schilling, Kirchner faithful lover, whom he had met several years before the war, visits the artist in a sanatorium and conducts his business in Berlin. She will be there until the end of his life Kirchner.

Since 1918, the artist lives in Switzerland. He will rent a room in Davos, builds the furniture and will be a long time to decorate her thread, your doctor write that lives calmly and steadily, drawing designs patterns for carpets. His painting is bright and more abstract. Exhibitions of works with huge success held in different cities of Germany and Switzerland, he was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of arts. Kirchner now I never felt healthy – and it was worth the effort to maintain emotional and physical balance. Depression and pain attacks alternated with periods of rest.

But even from afar, from abroad, and long before the huge disaster he senses imminent danger. In 1933, with the coming to power in Germany the national socialists Kirchner loses everything: his paintings confiscated from museums, he is expelled from the Academy after the show "Degenerate art"works are not for sale. "We created a "Bridge" to support native German art, made in Germany. And now it is declared non-German. My God, this is upsetting!"writes Kirchner. In 1938 Kirchner knows that Germany invaded Austria, and horror waiting for the capture of Switzerland. In the courtyard of his house he'd kill himself, not doubting that the world will be another tragedy, another war that he is no longer able to survive.

Author: Anna Sidelnikova