Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes
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Marcella has now become quite at home and is developing fine features. We have become quite familiar with one another.. .There exists quite a charm in such a pure female, indications that could make one crazy. More fantastic than those of the older girls. More free, without having lost the developed female. Maybe some things are more developed in her than in the more mature ones and will diminish again.
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A primitive power of artistic sensuousness speaks from the prints, which itself develops directly from the graphic technique that is tied to painstaking effort. Like the 'savage' who with patience cuts the figure.. ..out of the hard wood, so the artist creates perhaps his purest and strongest pieces.. ..following the primordial curse, if one may so understand it: from the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread.
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..how the movement of the passers-by in his Street scene painting of 191-14 is comprehended in the rhombus of the heads which is twice repeated. In this way life and movement arise from an original geometric form. Kirchner designed a diagram together with this line in the letter.
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..momentarily, we Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, and I are once again at Moritzburg. There is nothing more delightful than nudes in open air.
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I am very happy and thankful to be 'here' Switzerland and to remain. Here I can at least work a little on my good days, and be at peace among these simple, kindly people. In this solitude I have fought my way through to the possibility of continuing to live, even suffering so much. My time for circuses, 'cocottes' and company is over referring to his wild 'Brücke'-years in Berlin. I made what I could out of it, and I do not think it had been done in that way before. Otherwise there is nothing to link me with those 'événements'. During my 7 years in Berlin I let the whole essence of that kind of thing seep into me so thoroughly that I now know it back to front, and can leave it. Now I have other tasks, and they lie here. I cannot go down again into the throng. I am more than ever afraid of crowds. But more still, my work here is only at the beginning of its possibilities.
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You too, find release only in art, you are one of those privileged people who have that gift, and you will be free and at peace so long as you make use of it. Art gives us an inner superiority, for it has scope for every sensation of which human beings are capable, and first and foremost for love, which is the basis for knowledge. The artist loves without wanting to possess, and no one on earth can understand that except other artists, that is why other people think us mad.
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Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops in Berlin. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface.
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The struggle for existence is very difficult here Berlin! - in 1911 Kirchner and his Brücke-friends moved from Dresden to Berlin, but the possibilities are also greater. I hope that we can create a fruitful new school and convince many new friends of the value of our efforts.
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I was born near a station. The first things that I saw in my life were the moving locomotives and trains, and I drew them as a three-year-old. Perhaps it is because of this that observations of movement are my impetus for my inspiration to create. Out of this I receive a creative experience of life, which is the source of creativity.
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Only the artist who has a love and an aptitude for craftsmanship should make prints; only when the artist truly prints himself does the work earn the name original print.
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Carving a sculpture in wood is such a sensual pleasure when blow by blow the figure grows more and more from the trunk.
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The desire that drives an artist to graphic work is perhaps partly the effort to capture the unique and indefinite nature of a drawing in a fixed and durable form. Another aspect of it is that the technical manipulations exercise energies in the artist that he does not use in the far less strenuous crafts of drawing and painting.. .the mysterious attraction that surrounded the invention of printing in the Middle Ages is still felt by anyone who takes up graphics seriously and performs every stage in the process wit hits own hands.
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The beautiful, architectonically constructed, severely formed bodies of these women his girlfriend in Berlin and life companion, Erna with her sister Gerda replaced the soft Saxon physique.
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Bloated, one Kirchner himself staggers off to work, where all work is in vain and the onslaught of mediocrity flattens everything. Like the cocottes that I painted, that is how one is now. Wiped out, next time gone.
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We Europeans have to toil to achieve it, at least as a transitional stage, for it is what we feed our dreams upon. These Orientals from India have it in their blood, perhaps because they spend their lives I the sun. We poor wretched Europeans must sacrifice body and soul for even a shadow of it.. .It is not a question of trying to reproduce objective features, only of good practice for the fingers and for the perceptive faculty, and that too is very useful. You must have read how Van Gogh was always getting his brother to send him drawings to copy. And how Rembrandt used to copy Indian an Italian pictures. Not of course, because they were short of material, but to get 'du corps'. So one should be always drawing.. .Oh, you'd love the Indians. The pure, Aryan Indians, not those one could see in Berlin, whose forms had become rigid and sterile through mingling with the Chinese.
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It would be nice if you wouldn't call me an expressionist. I'm really not one.
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A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.
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I begin with movement... I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement..
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Is such a street scene as the blue prostitutes not a picture of fantasy? Of course, only the accusation is really present. But how nice, how powerful, and how removed from nature is the design. The danger of being caught up in the representational did not exist for Kirchner he is writing about himself, in the third person. Instead he thought too painterly for that. The graphics and paintings of the 'Streetscenes' show best where purely painterly, one could say non-representational, feelings converged.
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The heaviest burden of all is the presence of the war and the increasing superficiality. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival.. .I am now like the whores, I once painted in his Berlin-time: the merest brushstroke now, gone tomorrow. Nonetheless I am still trying to put my thoughts in order and, from all the confusion, create an image of time, which is my task, after all.
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It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.
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Here we have been hearing terrible rumours about torture of the Jews by the Nazis, but it's all surely untrue. I'm a little tired and sad about the situation up there. There is a war in the air. In the museums, the hard-won cultural achievements of the last 20 years are being destroyed, and yet the reason why founded the Brücke was to encourage truly German art, made in Germany. And now it is supposed to be un-German Degenerated Art / Entartete Kunst. Dear God. It does upset me.
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There is an intellectual guardianship over the world, it is man.. .This is the last judgement, before them you stand.. .They help you when you work. You can thank them only through work. When you want to die, they sometimes appear to you. When you are completely empty and completely open, you belong to them. After his mental recovery.
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Many thanks for your letter and the Gauguin woodcuts.. .One can see, incidentally, that Gauguin had Persian miniatures, Indian batik and Chinese art in his very blood. The shapes of the birds and the horse show that clearly. But although it looks very well, Gauguin can't stimulate us present-day artists much. We need a direct route from life to plastic form. And we get it by perpetually drawing everything we see.