Artists have long been fascinated by the female body, which becomes a release for feelings of loneliness and desire. It was only through the canvas that Vincent Van Gogh was able to touch the perfect silhouette of lines and curves that evoked a warm seductive body.
Van Gogh would paint prostitutes, turning their gray environment into a colorful landscape of emotions. It was only natural that someone else from the art world would feel that same desperate call to be loved by an impossible love.
Van Gogh’s agony touched the heart of German painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who came a few decades after the Dutch artist. As a young man searching for his place in the world, he used his art to fight off the feelings of loneliness and traveled to Munich to study at the Academy of Fine Arts.
From his mentor he took the warm and subjective colors, mixing it with a taste for flat shapes with little volume and almost no perspective, which was made obvious with the use of thick lines. His paintings featured public women at seedy night spots and alleyways with dark mysterious characters.
His work reminds us of the Expressionists’ formal simplifications with the use of random color. While Van Gogh’s influence is more evident in his initial pieces, he would eventually choose for a more synthetic and two-dimensional style. Kirchner tried to derive the natural shape of objects into more radical and brutal simplifications. This becomes obvious in the “Self Portrait with Model” from 1907, where the bold lines and colors create a foreboding sense of violence.
In 1905, he led the Die Brücke movement, which attempted to experiment and innovate, but was also a protest against the academicism of the Belle Époque. For art historians, this signaled the start of an age of crisis. The style consisted in choosing loud colors, chaotic angular brushstrokes, themes of anxiety, and distorted shapes that demonstrated the author’s mental state.
In 1911, he moved to Berlin, where he carried out some of his most characteristic works of German Expressionism, particularly with “Five Women on the Street”, in 1913, where he mocks the fake manners of Berlin society with grotesque distortions.
This moment of critique did not last long, since it was only a few years later when Germany began to prepare itself for the First World War. Kirchner was drafted to fight in the war, which resulted in him abandoning art because he was haunted by images of blood, death, and mutilated bodies. He did a self portrait dressed as a soldier in his Berlin studio. His eyes are lost in thought while his right forearm is missing after it was amputated. His greatest fear was to have his artistic career end because of his injuries.
His physical and emotional pain ended with his discharge from the battlefield and subsequent move to a little Swiss town, where he lived in isolation for the rest of his life. With the rise of the Nazi forces in Germany, his work was deemed as degenerate and many of his paintings were destroyed. This led to the artist relapsing into a deep depression that ended in his suicide in June, 1938.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s legacy continues as one of the twentieth century’s avant-garde.
