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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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
People become artists out of despair.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
I see the possibilities of a new kind of painting. With free surfaces, the goal I was always steering towards.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
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).
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
..the feeling that pervades a city presented itself in the qualities of lines of force.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
A happy coincidence brought together in Die Brücke the really talented men whose characters and gifts, even in human terms, left them with no other choice than the profession of artist. This form of living, of dwelling and working, though peculiar for a regular human being, was not a deliberate 'epater le bourgeois', but simply a very naive and pure necessity to harmonize art and life. And it was precisely this more than anything else that so tremendously influenced the forms of present-day art. Of course, it was mostly misunderstood and totally distorted, for there the will fashioned the form and gave it meaning, whereas here the unfamiliar form is affixed to habit, like a top hat on a cow.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner -
I see possibilities for a whole new way of painting, in which planes are used more freely. Weaving and embroidery make this possible.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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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.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner