German Expressionism – my daily art display

Self Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary by Paula Modersohn-Becker

My blog today concludes my look at the life of the German Expressionist painter, Paula Becker, later to become Paula Modersohn-Becker. For her early life you should first read my last blog.

As I told you in that last blog, Paula moved to Worpswede and joined the other artists in 1898. The artist colony provided her with a lot of inspiration. She was influenced by resident artists such as Heinrich Vogeler, whose house, the Barkenhoff, was the centre of the artistic community. She became great friends with the young sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet Rainer Rilke, who in 1901 would marry Clara. She also struck up a friendship with the young German painter Otto Modersohn and his wife Helene. Otto and Helene Schröder had married in 1897 and their daughter Elsbeth was born the following year.

Paula quickly found her own artistic style, painting pictures of withdrawn farm children and elderly ladies whom she painted in poorhouses (see previous blog). Paula from the outset had loved the peace and tranquillity at Worpswede but being still young, for remember, she was only twenty-two when she arrived at the artist colony, she still hankered after the excitement of city life. So after more than twelve months at Worpswede she decided to head for the then art capital of the world – Paris. She left Germany on December 31^st 1899, the last day of the nineteenth century. After settling in Paris she wrote a letter to her mother, in which she commented about the change of scene:

“…I see these Paris trips as a positive addition to the slightly one-sided life I lead here……………After 10 quiet months in Worpswede, I feel that immersing myself in a foreign city with all of its stimuli is something really essential for my life…”

Clara Westhoff and Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula was not alone in Paris as her friend, the sculptor from Worpswede, Clara Westhoff, had moved there the previous year hoping to study under August Rodin. At first, life in Paris was difficult for Paula. She lived in a small cramped attic room but she still embraced life in Paris with great enthusiasm and was determined to avail herself of an education in the arts, a thing which was still denied to women in Germany at the time. Whilst in the French capital, Paula Becker studied at both the Académie Colarossi and the École des Beaux-Arts, and made numerous visits to the Louvre, all the time taking pleasure in absorbing the artistic life of the city. Through her friend Clara, she met and got to know sculptor Auguste Rodin. She made many visits to contemporary exhibitions and was deeply impressed by the works of the Post-Impressionists especially Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. She was also influenced by the strong colours used by the Fauve artists and the Realism style of Jean-François Millet.

From April to November of 1900, Paris hosted a World Fair, known as the Exposition Universelle. The reason for this great event was to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next. Paula invited Otto Modersohn, who was still at Worpswede, to come with his wife and daughter and see the great exposition. Otto Modersohn arrived in Paris in June along with another Worpswede artist, Fritz Overbeck, but he had had to leave his wife behind as she was unwell, suffering from tuberculosis. Tragically she died whilst her husband was still in Paris. He immediately returned to Worpswede to look after his one year old daughter. Paula also returned to Worpswede and during the following year she and Otto Modersohn married and Paula became stepmother to his daughter, Elsbeth.

Paula could not settle back in Worpswede and was determined that she would have to return to Paris if she was to become a serious painter. Her husband was very unhappy with her decision to leave him despite her promising to return to Worpswede on frequent visits. So although married, she abandoned her husband, despite his protestations, and returned to Paris. On arriving in Paris she recorded her thoughts about what the future held for her:

“…Now I have left Otto Modersohn, I stand between my old life and my new one. What will happen in my new life? And how shall I develop in my new life? Everything must happen now…”

These long periods living away from Otto put pressure on their marriage and after a few years the marriage was all but over and they continued to live separate lives. In 1907 she returned to Otto in Worpswede and it appeared that the two had reconciled. Paula became pregnant and bore a child, a daughter Mathilde. Mathilde (Tillie) Modersohn was born on November 2^nd 1907. Otto and Paula were delighted with their new arrival but their joy was short lived as less than three weeks later, on November 20^th 2007, Paula Modersohn-Becker died from a post-natal embolism. She was just thirty-one years of age. Sadly, that same month Paula’s mother died of a heart attack.

My Daily Art Display’s featured painting today is one Paula completed in Paris in May 1906. It is entitled Self Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary. It is an unusual study as one needs to remember that at the time she painted this picture, she was not pregnant. On the contrary, she had been reported as saying that, at that time in her life, she was not ready to have children and certainly not a child with Otto! So why did she depict herself “with child”? I do not know the answer to that but I read one article the other day in which the author states:

“….Paula was not pregnant in this painting. The painting, then, is a metaphor for how she felt about herself as a young artist: fecund, ripe, able for the first time in her life to create and paint freely in the manner that she wished. What she is about to give birth to is not a child but her mature, independent, artistic self…”

I will let you make your own mind up as to why she would want to depict herself as being pregnant.

In the painting, she has portrayed herself with the distended stomach of a pregnant woman but her breasts are small and pert and lack the fullness one associates with pregnancy. It is a life-size portrayal, measuring 101cms x 70cms. She stands before us, naked to the waist. Her eyes are level with ours. She stares out at us with her large brown eyes. Her auburn hair is parted in the centre and swept up into a chignon. She half smiles. Her expression is one of self-confidence. She appears unabashed by her nakedness as she tilts her head to one side in a questioning gesture. Her only clothing is a white cloth skirt which is loosely tied around her hips below her distended belly. Her large hands lie above and below her belly. It is as if she is framing and showcasing her pregnancy. Around her neck, and lying between her breasts, is a necklace made up of lozenge-shaped amber coloured beads, which subtly glow against her pale skin.

There is a Gauginesque Tahitian look about the painting. It is an unusual and a complex self portrait which she painted on the occasion of her sixth wedding anniversary to Otto Modersohn and we know that, at this time, their marriage was well and truly on the rocks and maybe that is why she signed the painting “PB” for Paula Becker, her maiden name and left out “Modersohn” her married name.

Almost a year after her death, Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet and husband of her friend Clara Westhoff wrote the poem Requiem for a Friend in memory of Paula. The poem itself is too long to add to this blog but I have attached the website URL below if you would like to read the full translation of this very moving poem.

http://www.paratheatrical.com/requiemtext.html

Her daughter Tillie, who died in 1998, aged 91, founded the Paula Modersohn-Becker-Foundation (Paula Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung) in 1978. The Paula-Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen has the distinction of being the first museum devoted to the work of a female painter. Early in the 20th century, the patron and merchant Ludwig Roselius amassed a collection of the artist’s major works and this along with works from the Paula Modersohn-Becker Foundation bear out her importance as a pioneer of modern painting.

In 1988 a stamp with the portrait of Paula Modersohn-Becker was issued in the series Women in German History by the German

Old Peasant Woman Praying by Paula Modersohn-Becker

Old Peasant Woman by Paukla Modersohn-Becker (1905) — Old Peasant Woman Praying by Paukla Modersohn-Becker (1905)

In My Daily Art Display of July 28^th 2012, I looked at the life and works of the German Expressionist painter, Gabriele Münter and in my next two blogs I want to showcase the life and feature a couple of the works of art of another early German Expressionist artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker. She may not be familiar to some of you but I am sure you will find her life story interesting, if a little sad, and her artwork unusual.

: Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Becker was born in Friedrichstadt, a central district of Dresden in 1876. She was born into a cultural middle-class family, the third of seven children. Her father, who was the son of a Russian university professor, had been a government railroad official but had had to take early retirement on health grounds and her mother was the daughter of an aristocratic family. When Paula was twelve years of age she and her family moved to Bremen. In 1892, when she was sixteen years of age, she travelled to London to stay with one of her father’s sisters. During her seven month stay in England she received her first drawing lessons. Paula loved drawing and painting and wanted to become an artist but her father, mindful of the poor financial rewards of being an artist, insisted that first she must enrol on and complete a two-year teachers’ training course before he would allow her to follow her dream of becoming a painter and study at the Berlin School of Women Artists. She attended the teachers’ training college in 1893 and completed the course two years later. During this two year period she received drawing and painting lessons from the German painter and stage designer, Bernhardt Wiegandt.

Just a few miles north of Paula’s Bremen home was the small village of Worpswede, which is situated in the Teufelsmoor, a region of bog and moorland. It was to play a large part in Paula’s life as it had become the home of an artistic community. It all began in 1884 when Mimi Stolte, the daughter of a shopkeeper in Worpswede, whilst staying with her aunt in Düsseldorf, met Fritz Mackensen, a young art student at the city’s Art Academy and since he was virtually penniless, she took pity on him and invited him to Worpswede to spend the holidays with her family. After that, he visited her on a number of occasions and liked the area so much that, in 1889, he made it his home and soon, along with his artist friends, Otto Modersohn and Hans am Ende, founded the artists’ colony of Worpswede. Other artists, writers and poets soon descended on the small town and in 1895 the “Kunsthalle Bremen” exhibited works by artists from Worpswede for the first time.

In 1896 Paula Becker enrolled on a painting and drawing course run by the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (Union of Berlin Female Artists) which offered art studies to women. Following this she began a one-and-a half-year apprenticeship. At first she concentrated on drawing lessons with portrait and nude studies and later she studied painting under the tutorship of the Swedish/German painter, Jeanna Bauck. The following year, Paula Becker visited the artist colony at Worpswede for the first time and met the German painter, Fritz Mackensen, who became her art tutor. In 1898 Paula left home and went to live in Worpswede and worked alongside the other artists. During this period she completed many works depicting women and children of the farming community and for models she would use the local peasant women and their children as well as getting some of the old women from the local poor house to pose for her. She also completed some landscape works, which depicted the desolate and dark moors which surrounded the Worpswede area. These moors were crossed by a number of canals used by barges for transporting locally harvested peat moss to Bremen. The artist colony painters of Worpswede believed in and promoted a romanticized view of country life, which they believed was a powerful antidote to the revulsion they felt for urban industrialization. Paula however thought differently and rejected the sentimental approach of her fellow artists, believing that a basically realistic subject could better represent profound spiritual values. Although there was a kind of peace and tranquillity at Worpswede she still hankered after the excitement of city life. So after more than twelve months at Worpswede she decided to head for the art capital of the world – Paris. She left Germany on December 31^st 1899, the last day of the nineteenth century.

My Daily Art Display featured painting today is entitled Old Peasant Woman Praying which Paula Becker completed in 1905. There is a kind of Primitivism to this painting similar to what we have seen in Gaugin’s works. The woman has her large lumpish peasant hands crossed over her chest in a meditative prayer-like manner. There is a religious feel to this work. One cannot say for sure what is in the background. Could it be the coping of a wall with a large leafed tree in the background or is it just a flower/leaf-patterned wall. However note how the artist has interrupted the background with brightness around the head of the peasant, almost halo-like, giving her a kind of spirituality. She has a weather-beaten face from the continuous hours spent outside working in the unforgiving sunlight. The painting is of a lower-class peasant woman and yet it is not a condescending painting. There is a certain dignity about this woman. This was never just a peasant painting which was meant to entertain the elite. This is quite different to the way Van Gogh depicted his peasants in The Potato Eaters (See My Daily Art Display February 7^th 2012). Paula has given her subject a modicum of respect and by doing so has created a beautiful work of art.

In my next blog I will tell you more about Paula Becker’s life, her marriage to Otto Modersohn and her untimely death and feature some more of her works of art.

Self-Portait as a Soldier by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Self-Portrait as a Soldier by Ernst Kirchner (1915)

In my last blog I looked at the early life of the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. I left off the biography at the time he decided to leave Dresden and move to Berlin. He was still a member of Die Brücke art group, which he had helped to form, and life for Kirchner was good. Alas, as we all know only too well, life is not constantly good and to our liking and in this second and final instalment of Kirchner’s life I look at what went wrong.

In 1906, Die Brücke held its first exhibition, and two new artists, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, joined the group. The following year, one of their founder members, Fritz Bleyl married and left the group to concentrate on looking after his family. In 1908 Pechstein moved to Berlin and in October 1911, Kirchner followed, along with some of the other artists from the group. It was in Berlin that Kirchner along with Pechstein founded a private art school, known as the MIUM-Institut, (Moderner Unterricht in Malerei-Institute). Kirchner’s aim for this private school was to spread the word about modern ways of teaching art. Alas, the venture failed with only two candidates, friends of Kirchner, enrolling on the first course. The school closed the following year. It was in this same year, 1912, that Kirchner met and started a relationship with Erna Schilling, a relationship which would endure all his life.

With all groups of artists, there comes a time when they begin to drift apart, because of their differing views of the future. In cases of musicial groups one of them often wants to pursue a solo career and in the case of artist groups sometimes one of them wants to stage a solo exhibition of their work. With all groups of artists, whether it is painters or musicians, there is often a hierarchical dilemma. Is there to be a leader of the group? Is the group to be run on a consensual basis? This was the problem with Die Brücke as Kirchner believed he was the leader of the group and in 1913 he wrote the Chronik der Brücke, chronicling the history and aims of the group. In his summation of what had gone before he portrayed himself as the leader and thinker of the group and the others were his followers and this upset the other members. This publication along with the desire of some of the members, including Kirchner himself, to do their “own thing” led to the break-up of Die Brücke. Probably because of what Kirchner had written in the chronicle the break-up was not an amicable one and harsh words were exchanged. For Kirchner the split had been so acrimonious that he completely disassociated himself from Die Brücke artists for the rest of his life and would in later years denigrate the work of the group saying the paintings he did during Die Brücke days were simply “the nonsense of youth”. Kirchner was determined that history should remember him and his art as a personal triumph, that he was self-sufficient and in fact, never needed Die Brücke.

An Artists’ Group by Kirchner (1927)

The one time, in later years, when he reflected on his Die Brücke days, was in 1926 when he completed a large panel painting entitled An Artists’ Group, which depicted Otto Mueller seated reading the infamous Chronik der Brücke whilst Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff stood to the right discussing this very chronicle, which ironically contributed to splitting the group asunder. Otto Mueller who had only joined Die Brücke in its latter days was included in the work because he was a particular friend of Kirchner but Kirchner pointedly omitted Max Pechstein from the depiction, as he was the least popular member and he had left the group in 1912.

The year 1914 signalled the start of the First World War and this was to have a terrible and deep impact on Kirchner. He received his call-up papers and joined the German army as an “unwilling volunteer” and was posted to Halle where he served as a driver in the artillery in order to avoid being drafted for less desirable duties. Life in the army proved too much for Kirchner and he suffered a series of physical ailments, due to general weakness and lung problems. He eventually suffered a mental breakdown which resulted in him being temporarily discharged from army and confined to a number of sanatoria. Was he ill or did he just want to be away from army life and the horrors of war? Maybe we will never know but during his time in hospital and sanatoria he was able to produce some of his best works including my featured painting today, Self-Portrait as a Soldier.

: Stafelalp by Moonlight by Kirchner (1919)

Kirchner’s mental state showed no sign of improvement and his friends decided that he should move to a more tranquil environment and so they helped him emigrate to Switzerland and the small mountain town of Frauenkirche which lay just below the Stafelalp, just south of Davos. Here he remained for most of his life. It was during these latter years that although his artistic style remained the same, the subjects of his art changed and he took a keen interest in the life of the farmers, who worked in this mountainous region, and he recorded it in some of his works. Although Kirchner was now living in a tranquil setting and his lifestyle was much more relaxed, he was suffering from his time in the various German hospitals and had developed an addiction to drugs and this was exacerbated further by his alcoholism. It was not until 1921 that he managed to wean himself off this narcotic addiction and get his life back together.

During the mid 1920’s Kirchner visited Germany in an attempt to regain recognition for his artistic works. He received a number of commissions and in 1927 he had hoped to be appointed a professor at the Kunstakademie in Dresden. In 1931 he was admitted to the Preussische Akademie der Künste in Berlin and by now most of the major museums in Germany housed some of his artworks. Things were once again looking up for Kirchner but all that was to end two years later in 1933 when the National Socialists came to power. Four years later, in 1937, the National Socialists campaign, known as entartete Kunst (degenerate art), stripped all the museums of his art and he was forced to resign from the Akademie in Berlin. This proved all too much for Kirchner who had returned to his home in Frauenkirch, where on June 15^th 1938, aged 58, he stood before his small house and shot himself.

The work I have featured today is the oil on canvas painting, entitled Self-Portrait as a Soldier, which he completed in 1915 and now hangs in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College in Ohio. In it Kirchner imagines that due to the savagery of war, his hand has been severed and he is unable to paint. Could it be that Kirchner was thinking about Van Gogh’s 1889 painting, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear when he first set about this work, albeit Kirchner’s severed hand was simply in his mind whereas Van Gogh’s self-mutilation was very real?

The work is all about Kirchner’s fears with regards how the war would affect him as an artist. His fear was such that it was almost a pathological fear as to what would happen to him and his life as an artist. It was not just about him but his belief that all young artists would be adversely damaged both mentally and physically by the conflict. Kirchner painted the Self-Portrait as a Soldier during his time recovering at a sanatorium in Halle. He has depicted himself in the uniform of the Königlich-Preußische Mansfelder Feldartilierie-Regiment Nr. 75 of Halle/Saale. It is a haunting portrayal. His face is drawn with a cigarette hanging loosely from between his lips. His eyes are unseeing and empty, without pupils and in the irises we can see the reflection of the blue of his uniform. What are the most striking aspects of Kirchner’s self-portrait are the lost right hand and its bloody stump. This grotesque aspect of the painting is the way Kirchner viewed his losses or possible future losses caused by the war. He is concerned that he will lose his ability to paint. He believes that all his creativity, artistic vision, and inspiration will be destroyed. Behind the self portrait stands a nude woman. There would seem little to connect the military man and her except that Kirchner may have wanted to think back on his early artistic days and his period where nudity dominated his works.

The style of Kirchner’s self-portrait is similar to his famous Berlin street scenes which he painted between 1913 and 1915. In those, like this work, the style he used was of a primitive manner. Kirchner had introduced primitivism to Die Brücke group. Primitivism is a reference to the use by Western artists of forms of imagery derived from the art of the so-called primitive peoples especially those who had been colonized by Western countries.

Although Expressionism is not my favourite artistic style I have enjoyed researching the work and life of Ernst Kirchner and will soon return to look at some of his contemporaries.

Bathers at Moritzburg by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Bathers at Moritzburg by Ernst Kirchner (1909)

My last three blogs looked at Italian Renaissance paintings but today, and in my next blog, I want to move in a completely different artistic direction and look at the life and work of a man who is widely acknowledged as the greatest artist of German Expressionism. His name is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Before I look at the early life of Kirchner I suppose I should explain a little about the term Expressionism. Expressionism came about around 1905 and lasted until about 1920. It is a term given to a style of painting, music, or drama in which the artist or writer seeks to express the inner world of emotion rather than external reality. This term Expressionism is applied to art which seeks to cause an emotional response, not to actual pictorial content but to the exaggerated style adopted by the artist who is seeking to reflect his inner self. The term is generally applied to modern European art, where exaggerated forms and vivid colours were employed. In Germany, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was disillusionment with the old fashioned academic styles of painting and this prompted a flood of experimentation and innovation. The artists were desperately searching for a new way to express themselves through the medium of painting and by doing so convey their personal experiences of their new modern world with all its advancing technology. Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him or her. They accomplish their aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. The actual term Expressionism was first used in the preface of the catalogue for the 22nd Berlin Secession Exhibition of April 1911 to describe the work of Braque, Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck and Marquet.

Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg in northwest Bavaria in 1880 and is now looked upon as one of the most important representatives of Expressionism. Kirchner was brought up in a middle–class family environment. His father was an industrial chemist. Kirchner showed an early interest in drawing and as an extra-curricular activity, during his school years his parents arranged for him to have drawing and watercolour lessons at home. His parents support for his love of art was not wholehearted as they saw no future in their son becoming an artist and so after taking his final school leaving exams they insisted he attended the Königliche Technische Hochschule to study architecture. Kirchner went along with his parents’ plans as he believed the course would also allow him to have further training in art, such as freehand and perspective drawing. He took his preliminary diploma in 1903 after which he spent the winter term studying in Munich.

Whilst at the Hochschule he became close friends with another student Fritz Bleyl and later they, along with two other architecture students, Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, after successfully completing their architecture degree course in 1905, formed an artist group which they called Die Brücke (The Bridge). The name, given to their group by Rottluff, was to symbolise a connection between Germany’s artistic past and future and they intended that their art would be that very link and the way forward. Theirs was a radical group which was opposed to middle-class conventions, which they considered lacked fervour, and it was their aim to shun the traditional academic style of art and initiate a new style of painting which would be more in keeping with modern life. They still saw their artistic work as belonging firmly within the tradition of German art, especially the art of Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder. This young group of artists was anti-establishment, liberal in their attitude and full of revolutionary ideas. Like all new groupings the four founders decided that the group should have its own manifesto setting out its ambitions. Kirchner was in the forefront of thinking up the wording for the manifesto and he clearly summed up what the group wanted to achieve:

“….. freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces…”

The group met regularly at the Dresden studio of Kirchner. The lifestyle of this group was Bohemian in character. In the Royal Academy 2003 exhibition catalogue Kirchner – Expressionism and the city, a quote from Fritz Bleyl described his friend’s first studio, which had formerly been a butcher’s shop:

“…[it was] that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist’s materials — much more like an artist’s romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student…”

In Kirchner’s studio social standards were largely ignored. Art historians quote reports of the goings-on which took place at the studio and recount tales of “much impulsive love-making and naked cavorting”. During these meetings at Kirchner’s studio, the artists met to study the nude in group life-drawing sessions. However, Kirchner wanted to distance himself from the rigid and painstaking academic style of life drawing and he and his fellow artists would instead sketch the naked women, quickly in quarter-hour sessions (Viertelstundenakte) and by so doing, they believed that they were able to capture the fundamental nature of their subject as instinctively as they could. The models who posed nude for Kirchner’s group were not professional models; they were just part of Kirchner’s circle of friends, who were only too willing to become part of this newly-founded art movement.

The lifestyle of the group in some ways was mirrored in the flower-power days of the 1960’s or the punk rock days of the late 70’s. They hoped and succeeded in shocking the bourgeoisie. Normal social conventions were abandoned and the group’s studio became a place almost of decadence with group life-drawing sessions, frequent nudity and casual love-making. Like Matisse and Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was fixated with the female nude, as a symbol of his own intense sexuality as well as it being a seductive return to primitive nature. The intention of Die Brücke artists was to wage battle against the constricting forces of bourgeois culture. To them this culture was linked indelibly with mediocrity, corruption, and weakness. Kirchner believed fervently on self-empowerment and complete freedom from convention and this could be seen in his early art which often concentrated on erotic subject matter. In the paintings done by Kirchner and the other artists of this group they often depicted the female nude crudely as both “primitive” and submissive. For them this depiction of the female signified both male domination and male virility.

Die Brücke poster for the 1906 exhibition

In the September and October of 1906, a year after the formation of Die Brücke, the first group exhibition was held at the K.F.M. Seifert and Co. in Dresden. The works exhibited focused on the female nude and Fritz Bleyl designed the lithographic poster for the event. In 1906, Kirchner met Doris Große, who became his favoured model and remained at his side until 1911 when he decided to leave Dresden and move to Berlin. Doris would not make that journey. From 1907 to 1911, Kirchner liked to spend part of his summers at the Moritzburg lakes which lie to the north of Dresden. He and the other members of Die Brücke art group, along with their friends relaxed amidst the countryside tranquillity and led a relaxed communal lifestyle and embraced the popular German culture of going back to nature and dispensing with such frivolous things as clothes !

My featured painting today is by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and is entitled Bathers at Moritzburg which he completed around 1910. It is a painting depicting people who have for a short time shunned the claustrophobic and overpowering life in the city and have gone back to the freedom of nature. This is their reunion with nature. It is a painting full of energy. There is vigorous activity all around. The first thing that strikes one about this work of art is the overstated colours he has used in this painting. We have the contrast of the yellow-orange flesh of the bathers with the blue of the water. This contrasts serves to emphasise the nudity of the figures. Although I have dated the painting as being completed around 1909, the original effect may have been too extreme for Kirchner as in 1926 he repainted parts of the picture making the colours lighter and the surface of the painting more even. It is presently housed in the Tate Modern in London.

As a leading proponent of Expressionism how did Kirchner view his style? In a letter written in 1937 to art dealer Curt Valentin, he explained the development behind his own Expressionist style:

“…First of all I needed to invent a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion…I practised seizing things quickly in bold strokes, wherever I was and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself, and I found new forms in the ecstasy and haste of this work, which, without being naturalistic, yet represented everything I saw and wanted to represent in a larger and clearer way. And to this form was added pure colour, as pure as the sun generates it…”

In my next blog, I continue looking at the life of Ernst Kirchner as he moves to Berlin, suffers mentally from the rigours of World War I, splits from Die Brücke and spends the last years