Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes
-
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.
-
I see possibilities for a whole new way of painting, in which planes are used more freely. Weaving and embroidery make this possible.
-
..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.
-
I see the possibilities of a new kind of painting. With free surfaces, the goal I was always steering towards.
-
You can do anything. Nothing is forbidden.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
People become artists out of despair.
-
..the feeling that pervades a city presented itself in the qualities of lines of force.
-
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.
-
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).
-
I painted it in Berlin self-portrait 'The Drinker', while screaming military convoys were passing beneath my window day and night.