The Art Of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Expressionism

 

 

 

“The heaviest burden of all is the pressure of the war and the increasing superficiality. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival. I feel as though the outcome is in the air and everything is topsy-turvy.. All the same, I keep on trying to get some order in my thoughts and to create a picture of the age out of confusion, which is after all my function."



Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a German painter and Printmaker. He belonged to Expressionism as a modern artistic movement, in particular Die Brücke group “ The Bridge” which expanded in Dresden, Berlin before World War I. Kirchner’s personality is characterized by deep melancholy towards the modern world, and the lack of spirituality and authenticity. He voluntarily joined the military to fight in WWI, but he was released after several mental breakdowns, after the war he settled in Switzerland, he painted many landscapes there, and he got ill mentally from the horrors of the war. In 1938 he took his own life after the Nazis esteemed his art as degenerate and forced him to resign from the Berlin Academy of Art, and over than 600 of his pieces were destroyed, or detained.

Kirchner as an expressionist was interested in the human emotions. Expressionism, unlike - the former artistic movement -  Impressionism which was interested in portraying nature in a realistic representations, Is about communicating intense problematic emotions and feelings. Expressionism came as a reaction to the loss of spirituality and human relationships, it portrays the emptiness and vacant faces of people in a rapidly changing world. Artists, including Kirchner, felt increasingly alienated and ostracized, they searched in their depths for meaning, and inspiration, from their solitary gloomy hearts. Vivid colors, quirky distortion, and vigorous brushstrokes were the mean artists used to depict the modern world.

The first time I saw “The Street” by Kirchner, the effect of it never left me, first emotions I felt are still accessible to me. Kirchner’s Dresden scenes portray the isolation and anxiety he felt in the midst of impersonal city life. Everything about this image is jarring—the colors are harsh and clashing, the street has an unnatural slope, the pavement is crowded, and escape is blocked by a trolley car in the background. With its masklike, vacant faces and lonely figures, The Street perfectly embodies what Kirchner referred to as “agonizing restlessness”—the defining quality of so many Expressionist works.