Kirchner in Berlin

Figure 1 (click for additional info)

Figure 2

Figure 3

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The years of 1911-1914, during which he painted View from a Window, proved to be some of the most difficult in the life of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. At the recommendation of Max Pechstein, he moved to Berlin in 1911 with high hopes of furthered artistic success. Together they opened an art school that closed only a year later, primarily due to low attendance. On top of this Kirchner and his fellow members of the Brücke did not receive the widespread recognition they expected. After a promising start showing in two major exhibitions, one devoted to their work in a Berlin gallery and another as a part of the Sonderbund exhibition in 1912, a major art show in Cologne, they found only marginal success.[1] To combat this the group planned Chronik der Brücke (the Bridge Chronicle), a book to tell the history of the group with accompanying prints, for which Kirchner wrote the text. The other members rejected the book citing his apparent bias and focus on self-promotion. Prompted by this and their own developments as individual artist, the group spit in 1913.[2] All of these events, over a short three-year span, took a large toll on the artist. In the wake of what he believed to be failure, he drove himself into isolation.

During this time he began creating with a newfound with fervor, focusing on the streets of Berlin. He worked with great determination, but also with an underlying emotional dissonance. “They [the paintings] originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.”[3] It was in this restless state that he created his painting View From the Window (Figure 1). In this piece his fractured emotional state can be clearly seen. Paired with its obtrusive palette, the sharp angularity of the piece is unsettling. It was more than his emotions that influenced this painting though. The work is greatly informed by Kirchner’s deeply rooted personal philosophies and a variety of artistic inspirations. View From the Window represents the combination of his reverence for German artistic tradition and his exploration of a more modern style, conflicting with his own fragile emotional state. This work shows him trying to resolve certain combatting forces and ideals. Complicating this further are his often-conflicting accounts of what he meant in these works. 

Kirchner’s German heritage influenced much of his work. He strongly aligned himself with what he perceived as German tradition of art. This can be seen in his choice of woodcut for many pieces, in homage to the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, whom Kirchner believed to be the father of German art and a true master.[4] However, View From the Window does not take the medium of woodcut. This oil painting responds to a German tradition in a vastly different way. His focus on intense, personal expression was something he also saw as distinctly German. This manifests both in the form and the color of the piece. The idea of bending form to convey greater emotion is a characterizing feature of Northern Renaissance art. It can be seen the works of German masters like Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach, three artists with whom Kirchner was familiar. These artists distorted human proportions in a non-classicizing way to give their pieces a more nuanced meaning. In Grünewald’s Crucifixion (Figure 3) this can be seen in his treatment of Christ. His arms are far too long, further exaggerating the agony of his position and giving greater emphasis to his dismay. His body is gaunt, with his skin tightly wrapped around his ribs and pelvis. This unflattering portrayal gives further insight into his suffering. In works like these, the artists did not strive for harmony or realism, instead to capture the emotion of their subject.[5]

Kirchner’s treatment of shape and form in View From the Window are rooted in this understanding of German tradition, in that it rejects reality as its basis. For instance, the spatial relationships are inaccurate. Despite the many architectural forms there is no clear sense of linear perspective. The lines of the bridge run in parallel without receding, and the sides of the building all fall on the same special plane, making the space difficult to understand. This mirrors Kirchner’s own discomfort in his relatively new surroundings. He painted the space as he felt it, which was in a negative light. After the many events these recent years he had strong feelings of disillusionment and the un-inhabitable space created alludes to this.

In addition to earlier German works, Kirchner borrowed from a number of other sources including Italian Futurism. Futurism was a movement that Kirchner would have been familiar with. Der Sturm, a magazine that published a number of Kirchner’s prints, included a number of articles about these Italian works and the editor Herwarth Walden also held an exhibition for them in his Berlin gallery. These works were highly praised and represented the new avant-garde. Kirchner can be seen reacting in a very direct way to these works with his painting Alfred Döblin (Figure 2).[6]Alfred Döblin, a close friend of Kirchner, was a doctor and poet who had closely examined Futurism and written on the subject. In this portrait Kirchner appropriates the strong linearity and geometric from the genre, pooled with his own stylistic tendencies.

View From the Window also borrows these ‘lines of force’ from Futurism, in a less overt manner. The piece has a strong linearity. The rigid forms of the structures are contrasted with high energy, directional marks. These marks don’t relate to the planes of the building, but instead add movement. At the base of the painting the lines of the road bisect violently into to bridge. Moments like these establish a similar multi-faceted feel to many Futurist works, like those of Umberto Boccioni. In his oil painting Visioni simultanee, Boccioni uses line to create a frenzied movement within the cityscape. This, in addition to his distinct use of mark, is meant to show the power and dynamism of the urban sphere.

Kirchner’s motivation for engaging with Futurist subject matter and style was most likely to make art that felt relevant and modern. In 1912 Beckman released a statement condemning primitivism and its role in German Expressionism. The article stated that primitivism had no relation to their own historical traditional and mocked these forms of expression: “Are those crude and shabby figures we now see in all the exhibits really an expression of the complicated spirit of modern time?” Prompted by this, Kirchner set off to make a style more suited towards the time. He rejected the work of Emil Nolde, labeling it as “often sickly and too primitive.” [7] He adopted a new language of addressing his art heavily centered around the modern city. This can be seen in the description he gave a series of sketches of Berlin he made around the time: “They are unselfconscious and aimless, a mirror of the sensation of a man of our time.” [8]

In trying to balance his commitment to a German artistic tradition and a need to remain current, Kirchner lost a certain emotional honesty in how he wrote about his work. The artist characterized his process of creating as outpourings of joy and creativity prompted by his surroundings: “The work evolves as an impulse, in a state of ecstasy and even when the impression has long taken root in the artist, its rendition is nevertheless quick and sudden.” ⁸ The reality of his situation was much darker. Erna Shilling, his companion at the time, noted a chilling shift in his mood through the course of 1913. She confessed to her psychiatrist that by the winter of 1914 Kirchner was drinking a liter of absinth a day. He was plagued by headaches, anxiety attacks, and growing paralysis of the extremities.[9] Although only loosely suggested to by Kirchner, this sort of torment played a much larger role in his portrayal of the city than he let on.

He might have prefaced View From the Window as a sort of modern German expression; in a much more real way they wear projections of his misery. The colors used in the painting are green, red and yellow. The green and red clash give the piece a sense of uneasiness. The yellow cast a sort of sickly glow across the urban landscape. These colors are not meant to be informational; they are used for pure expressive purposes. During a dark period of his life these are the colors he chose allude to Kirchner’s distaste of Berlin and the trouble it had given him. Kirchner wasn’t praising the forces of modernity, but rather condemning them for what they had done to him.

Kirchner produced a large amount of work in the three years after moving to Berlin. It seems that his slow mental and physical decay only spurred him onwards. The work he created was incredibly charged. Amongst those, View From the Window can be seen is emblematic of his mindset at the time. It shows him trying to balance a number of outside influences while still maintaining his expressive voice. Kirchner had a lot to say in regard to his works at this time, but they speak louder on their own.