Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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..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 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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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.
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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.
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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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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 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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The bleak and yet so intimate nature of the mountains has had an enormous impact on the painter. It has deepened his love for his subjects and at the same time purged his vision of everything that is secondary. Nothing inessential appears in the paintings, but how delicately every detail is worked out! The creative thought emerges strongly and nakedly from the finished work. Kirchner is now so taken up with entirely new problems that one cannot apply the old criteria to him if one is to do justice to his work. Those who wish to classify him on the strength of his German paintings will be both disappointed and surprised. Far from destroying him, his serious illness has matured him. Besides his work on visible life, creativity stemming solely from the imagination has opened up its vast potential to him – for this the brief span of his life will probably be far from sufficient.
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Anyone who directly and honestly reproduces that force which impels him to create belongs to us.
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If suffering can be transformed into creativity . . . I want to try it.
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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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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.'