Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Founded Die Brucke, painted Berlin's streets on the edge of war, and never recovered from it.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg in 1880, trained as an architect, and founded Die Brucke in Dresden in 1905. The group's paintings of bathers at the Moritzburg lakes and of studio life were the beginning of German Expressionism; the Berlin street scenes of 1913 and 1914, with their spiky cocotte figures and lurching perspective, are its high point. He broke down during military training in 1915, was discharged, and spent the rest of his life at Davos in Switzerland painting mountains and peasants. The Nazis declared him degenerate and confiscated more than six hundred works. He shot himself in 1938.
Provenance between 1933 and 1945 is unavoidable with Kirchner and remains an active area of restitution. The Berlin street paintings are among the most valuable German pictures of the century and almost all are institutional. He was one of the great printmakers of the movement — woodcut, etching and lithograph, often in tiny numbers of impressions, catalogued by Dube — and the graphic work is where the market principally operates. Kirchner also backdated and reworked his own pictures at Davos, which complicates dating and is well documented.
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