In depth: art

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Painter, 1880–1938·Berlin

The Brücke Expressionist who painted Berlin’s streets in electric colour before the First World War.

By the ULTIMATE Berlin Editorial Team

The Brücke-Museum in Dahlem, Werner Düttmann’s low modernist building of 1967 among the pines, home of the world’s largest Brücke collection — Photo Credit
Image courtesy of © Gunnar Klack · CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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In the years before the First World War, no painter caught the nervous energy of Berlin like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His street scenes of 1913–15, with their tall, feathered women, jagged pavements and acid greens, are among the defining images of German Expressionism, and you can see one of the greatest of them in the Neue Nationalgalerie.

From architecture to Die Brücke

Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg on 6 May 1880. In 1901 he began studying architecture at the Royal Saxon Polytechnic in Dresden, spent 1903–04 in Munich, and returned to Dresden to finish his degree, by which time he had turned entirely to painting.

In 1905, with three fellow architecture students, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, he founded the artists’ group Die Brücke, The Bridge. Its programme, written by Kirchner in 1906, welcomed anyone who painted directly and without illusion what they felt compelled to create.

Colour, speed and the woodcut

The Brücke painters wanted art to feel immediate: flat, unmixed colour, angular forms and the raw cut of the woodcut, which Kirchner made his own. Summers between 1907 and 1911 by the Moritzburg lakes and on the Baltic island of Fehmarn, which he revisited until 1914, gave him bathers, dunes and harbours painted with the same urgency.

Berlin, 1911–1915

In 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin, where he and Max Pechstein opened a private art school that closed the following year. In 1912 he met the dancer Erna Schilling, who stayed with him for the rest of his life, and he painted himself in his studio flat in Friedenau.

In 1913 his Chronicle of the Brücke brought the group to an end. Over the next two years he painted the series that made his name: the Straßenszenen, street scenes of Berlin in which fashionable women stride through crowds of men, the city tilting around them.

Potsdamer Platz of 1914 hangs in the Neue Nationalgalerie; Street, Berlin of 1913 is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Berlin Street Scene, held by the Brücke-Museum from 1980, was returned to the heirs of its Jewish owner in 2006 and later sold in New York for a record price for the artist.

War and Davos

Kirchner volunteered for military service in 1914 but broke down in 1915 and spent months in sanatoriums, among them one in Berlin-Charlottenburg. From 1917 he lived in the mountains above Davos in Switzerland, where his painting turned to Alpine farms and people.

In 1931 he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, but in 1937 he was forced to resign, his work was branded “degenerate” and 639 of his works were removed from German museums. He died at his home at Frauenkirch near Davos on 15 June 1938.

“Everyone who reproduces, directly and without illusion, whatever he senses the urge to create, belongs to us.” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the Brücke programme, 1906

Where to see Kirchner in Berlin

The Brücke-Museum in Dahlem, opened in 1967 in Werner Düttmann’s low modernist building among the pines of Dahlem, holds the world’s largest collection of work by the Brücke artists: about 400 paintings and sculptures and several thousand drawings, watercolours and prints.

Our advice: see Potsdamer Platz in the Neue Nationalgalerie, then take a morning for the Brücke-Museum in Dahlem, among the pines of Dahlem. Exhibitions and loans change, so check both museums’ programmes before you go.