Ernst Kirchner's Circus Rider

Ernst Kirchner, "Circus Rider," 1914. Oil on Canvas, 200.7 x 151 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis.

Circus Rider, painted in 1914, captures Kirchner’s view of Berlin as city that had an excitement and glamour but a stronger undercurrent of jaded artificiality and chaos.[i]  Kirchner, master of German Expressionism, injected his art with “…human and nature, urban life and the everyday world…” by communicating his bold perceptions and his psychogram, the elements that made up his personal existence.[ii] Compared with contemporaries such as Ludwig Meidner, Kirchner’s take on urbanism was distinct in that he focused on the intricacies of human interactions that showcased greater undercurrents of change. Anonymous subjects like scenes of a café, streetwalkers or circus riders provided Kirchner with more freedom to explore how his own identity was being shaped by city life. Circus Riders is notably one of the first paintings by Kirchner after the break-up of the artists’ group The Bridge in late 1913. Thus, it so reflects the alienation and unrest he felt at the time as a lone artist seeking success.[iii] Overall, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was able to penetrate and to convey the contemporary human psyche as it was in Berlin by painting a typical urban scene with a spontaneous, jagged style that approximates the stimulating yet hectic urban environment.

Kirchner moved from the smaller city of Dresden to Berlin in 1911. Along with a larger population than Dresden, Berlin was becoming the center of a new consumer culture.[iv] Kirchner was fascinated with this fervent interest in department stores, fashion, and wealth, and he frequented walking through the city which his sketchbook drawing quick caricatures of people and environments.[v] He explored the subject of the circus with exceptional fervor, however, “…internalizing the vivid costumes and the rapid motions he witnessed firsthand while seated in the audience.”[vi] The reason for his fixation on the circus was due to its constant action as he wrote about in his manifesto from 1916: “I begin with movement…I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement.”[vii] In addition its many acrobats and stunts, the circus was also a place where people of multiple social classes and backgrounds would come together for entertainment, giving Kirchner a diversity of human subjects to sketch. Analyzing the painting itself closer, we see that Kirchner captured the experience of an observer at a circus in its chaos and energy.

The compressed composition and space as well as thick brushstrokes and splintered forms of Circus Rider create a claustrophobic scene that implicate the viewer as an observer. The subject of Circus Rider is a horse and his rider in the center of a circus arena with four audience members. The performer in the back follows the rider around the circle, with whirling ovals of yellow and brown that may be representations of moving performers. The placement of these objects and the overall composition of the painting are the result of Kirchner’s large-scaled manipulation of depth. He has angled the floor of the arena upwards so that it is now a vertical wall and so that the background space has been pushed to the front. Hence, the entire painting is composed so that figures and objects are flat and seem to stack on top of each other rather than recede into the back, as one would expect. Because there is only one plane of space, the circus audience members in the front of the painting seem to fold inwards, tightly packed into the edges of the painting. For the viewer, this makes the horse and rider seem even larger and the entire canvas seems to collapse forwards.

The effect of employing a lack of depth perception and the resulting muddled composition is to simulate the actual experience of being a spectator in a circus, the sensation of being in a circular closed space with loud noise and bursting energy. Kirchner makes this perspective more confusing by also eliminating any sense of background or middle ground, pushing against the confinements of the frame by concentrating movement against the edges. Kirchner illustrating the four circus audience members as cut off at the middle of their bodies and cramped around the bottom of the oval-like shape of the circus arena, including the observer of the painting as an implicit audience member. It is as if the viewer is looking both down at and in close proximity to the entire scene, a perspective that is realistically impossible.

Kirchner also fragments form in the painting, seen by both the thick brushstrokes and the largely geometrical shapes of most items in the painting. Kirchner’s broad, fast brushstrokes that are applied in a rhythmic pattern create the sense that a hidden force is moving everything around the arena in a circle. Kirchner employs these sharp strokes at angles, giving everything in the painting a directional energy towards the center, like a swirling vortex. Looking at the human rider, the horse, and the people situated along the bottom, the use of angled lines, triangular forms, and simple geometries is apparent. The horse’s hind thigh is almost a perfect triangle as is the long flat nose of the man on the bottom left. This effect of rendering figures in a geometric, jagged manner is that all the figures in the painting seem splintered and quickly sketched. Kirchner makes no attempt to conceal the crudeness of form or of brush technique, using it as a pictorial device that texturizes the surface of canvas and injects the painting with movement.

Kirchner presents his experience of a circus arena to communicate the overall heightened artificiality of the urban spectacle.. This artificiality is the means by which Kirchner conveys his perception of modern existence as a fake one in which appearances matter most. Circus Rider is also a more general reflection of the deeper human psyche in an urban environment in Kirchner’s opinion: a combination of excitement and instability. Comparing Circus Rider to Meidner’s Burning City, Kirchner’s decision to sketch the people of the city in a manner he believed was true to their nature is similar to Meidner’s rendering of the city landscape to reflect its character. Both artists are able to extract personal meaning from urban scenes to convey what in their minds was the true nature of modern existence. Circus Rider typifies the people in the circus and the circus space as an environment where Kirchner could unravel the complexities of an urban environment and visually communicate his urban experience.