Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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People become artists out of despair.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Life is unfixed when one lives in Berlin, where one has to fight for a living. It is painfully base here. I see that a fine, free culture cannot be created under these circumstances and wish to leave as soon as I have overcome this big slump.
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I find it increasingly necessary to express my ideas first in engraving or lithography so that they may develop before I start to paint. Every year my form and expression become more sensitive, and my ideas frequently have to pass through three graphic stages before I can start on the canvas. I can hear you say no, that is impossible because the value of the colors demands quite different treatment from black and white, but it is the inner idea that I try to establish firmly through graphic preparation.
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I see possibilities for a whole new way of painting, in which planes are used more freely. Weaving and embroidery make this possible.
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If suffering can be transformed into creativity . . . I want to try it.
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..art is made by man. His own figure is the center of all art.. .Therefore one must begin with the man himself.
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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.
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..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.
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They his 'Street Scene' paintings and drawings,he made in Berlin originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.
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You can do anything. Nothing is forbidden.
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I already realized that time that only a new study of nature and a new attitude towards life would bring the much-needed renewal of German art.
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Anyone who directly and honestly reproduces that force which impels him to create belongs to us.
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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.
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Did you know that in 1900 I had the bold idea of renewing German art?.. .First of all I needed to invent a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion, and it was Rembrandts drawings in the Kupferstichkabinett in Munich that showed me how. I practiced seizing things quickly in bold strokes, wherever I was, walking and standing still.. ..and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself, and I found new forms in the ecstasy and haste of this work.. ..and to these forms was added pure colour, as pure as the sun generates it.. ..in line with Goethe's theory of colours. It makes pictures much more colorful. Making wood-cuts, which I'd learnt as a fifteen-year-old from my father, helped me to stabler and simpler forms. And armed in this way I returned to Dresden.