Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes
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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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..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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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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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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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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You can do anything. Nothing is forbidden.
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All art needs this visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds.
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Our new little house Kirchner moved to the Wildboden house is a real joy to us. We shall live here comfortably and in great new order. This will really come to be a turning point of my life. Everything must be put in clear order and the little house furnished as simply and modestly as possible, while still being beautiful and intimate.
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..the feeling that pervades a city presented itself in the qualities of lines of force.
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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.'
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Simple people brought their bodies and shared their scanty bread with the artists. Kirchner learned the course of life again in their houses.
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I painted it in Berlin self-portrait 'The Drinker', while screaming military convoys were passing beneath my window day and night.
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The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting (remark on printmaking).
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I see the possibilities of a new kind of painting. With free surfaces, the goal I was always steering towards.
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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.