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Nowhere does one come to know an artist better than in his prints and the woodcut is the most graphic of the print processes.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
To study the nude, the foundation of all pictorial art, in total freedom and naturalness. From.. ..this basis there emerged the feeling, shared by all, of taking creative stimulus from life itself and submitting to the decisive experience.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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Completely strange faces pop up as interesting points through the crowd. I am carried along with the current, lacking will. To move becomes an unacceptable effort describing the crowds in Dresden.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
The account of a man who sells his shadow is in actual fact the life story of a persecution complex, that is to say, the paranoid narration of a man who through one event or another is suddenly made aware of his infinite smallness and at the same time finds the means by which to deceive the world in general, concerning this discovery.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
..he is Kirchner, writing about himself was especially interested in the naturally naked human being. He knowingly broke the traditional manner of the nude study and created for himself in his studio in his Brücke-years in Berlin a circle of young women, whom he studied in their free movement. Thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings and studies resulted from this. A beautiful, healthy, blossoming sensuality that never turns base emanates from these works.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
Believing in development, in a new generation of those who create and those who enjoy, we call together the youth of today. And as a youth which bears the future, we aim to create space to live and work, as opposition to the well-established, older powers. Everyone who reproduces, directly and without illusion, whatever he senses the urge to create, belongs to us.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
The people who live here in and around Davos are proud. The hard work, which is done with great love, the way they treat animals (you very seldom see an animal being mishandled) entitle them to be proud. In most cases, work here has reached the ideal standard of being done with love. You can see it in the movements of their hands. And that, in turn, ennobles the facial expression and imbues all personal contacts with a great delicacy.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
The woodcut is the most graphic of the printmaking techniques. Its practice demands much technical ability and interest. Kirchner's technical skill made woodcutting easy for him. Thus he came in a spontaneous way through the simplification necessary here to a clear style of representation. We see in his woodcuts, which constantly accompanied his creative work, the formal language of the paintings prefigured.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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..and the first thing for he artists of Die Brücke was free drawing from the free human figure in the freedom of nature.. .We drew and we painted. Hundreds of paintings a day, with talk and fooling in between, the artists joining the models before the easel and vice versa. All the encounters of everyday life were incorporated in our memories in this way. The studio became the home of the people who were being drawn; they learned from the artists and the painters from them. The picture made took on immediate and abundant life.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
After the war 1918 etching became Kirchner's favorite medium. He attributed this to its responsiveness. 'Etchings', he wrote, 'develop in the first states the most immediate hieroglyphs. Rich in lively handwriting and rich in variety of motifs, the etchings are like a diary of the painter.'
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
Down there it's still Summer, I suppose, whereas our sun in Switzerland is already gilding the mountains and the larches are turning yellow, but the colours are wonderful, like old, dark red satin. Down here in the valley the huts stand out in the strongest Paris blue against the yellow fields. Here one really learns the values of the individual colours for the first time. And the harsh, monumental lines of the mountains.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
..the only certainty is that he written by Kirchner himself creates from the forms of the visible world, however close or far from them he desires to or must come.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
After lengthy struggles I now find myself here Dr Kohnstamm's sanatorium in Königstein, in Taunus for a time to put my mind into some kind of order. It is a terribly difficult thing, of course, to be among strangers so much of the day. But perhaps I'll be able to see and create something new. For the time being, I would like more peace and absolute seclusion. Of course, I long more and more for my work and my studio. Theories may be all very well for keeping a spiritual balance, but they are grey and shadowy compared with work and life.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
You can do anything. Nothing is forbidden.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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Now I'm sitting quietly at home again and I'm happy to be able to work undisturbed. I made a lot of sketches of life in Germany and it was very intriguing to see life there in Berlin, a stay for three weeks. I was also glad to see the old pictures of Rembrandt, Dürer, etc. again and to have the confirmation and encouragement they gave me. As for the moderns, I saw damned little that gripped me.. .Modern German painting has moved so far away from me and become unintelligible in areas in which my work had, and still has, an influence; but people like Klee, Kandinsky, etc. have moved much closer to me again, in fact I value the Bauhaus more and more. These people are working and developing. You can see that there is development. And they love their work, which is the main thing.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
..art is made by man. His own figure is the center of all art.. .Therefore one must begin with the man himself.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
There was such a wonderful setting of the moon this morning, the yellow moon against little pink clouds, and the mountains a pure deep blue viewed from his Swiss farmhouse, quite glorious, I would so have liked to paint. But it was cold, even my window was frozen, although I had kept the fire in all night.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
The way of life of Die Brücke artists though strange to the ordinary man, was not meant to shock, it was a pure and simple compulsion to integrate art and life.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
Anyone who directly and honestly reproduces that force which impels him to create belongs to us.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
I painted it in Berlin self-portrait 'The Drinker', while screaming military convoys were passing beneath my window day and night.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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That all differences among the former Brücke members should be put in the past and that ..every individual conflict must be silenced and that everyone join together in the name of the whole, that is for our modern German art.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
I found it very difficult to suddenly depart from Berlin since this year I had risen completely in the landscape and life and hardly needed awareness to access this place.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
If suffering can be transformed into creativity . . . I want to try it.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
The new school in the Swiss village Frauenkirch where Kirchner lived since c. 1919 was inaugurated yesterday. It was a celebration with songs, dancing and speeches, followed by drinking such as I have not seen or experienced in decades. Everyone sat in the 'Post', the village council, the president of the council, the farmers, every one of one accord and friendly. They made a point of including me and so there I was, sitting once again amongst these people who had received me with such kindness and friendliness on the Alp twenty years ago. The relief in the school, made by Kirchner has found favour and was mentioned often in the speeches.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner