Kirchner

Bridging the gap

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) is regarded as one of the key figures in 20th-century European art. A Modernist to his bones, he sent seismic waves through the art world with his hard-edged, intensely colored paintings and disseminated his ideas through Die Brücke art movement and the MUIM-Institut school of modernist painting, both of which he cofounded. Kirchner’s work reconciled past and present through an Expressionist prism, reflecting the latest avant-garde ideas in art, while exploring traditional academic approaches and subjects.

His works tackled social, moral, and emotional questions with a fierce intensity. Distorted perspectives, rough lines, and unusual colors were mainstays of his practice, as well as a recurring interest in capturing the human form, whether in frenetic city vistas such as Berlin Street Scene (1913) or in his famously decadent studio.In this introductory book, we explore the stretch of Kirchner’s career through Germany and Switzerland, including his founding of Die Brücke, and his inclusion in the Nazis’infamous “degenerate art” exhibition in 1937.

Along the way, we’ll encounter vivid landscapes, stark nudes, intense urban settings, and, above all, a persistent ephasis on the emotional experience of painter and viewer.

Norbert Wolf graduated in art history, linguistics, and medieval studies at the Universities of Regensburg and Munich, and earned his PhD in 1983. He held visiting professorships in Marburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg-Erlangen, and Innsbruck. His extensive writings on art history include many TASCHEN titles, such as Diego Velázquez, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Caspar David Friedrich, Expressionism and more.

About the Author

Norbert Wolf is an art historian. He lives and works as a private lecturer and freelance author in Munich . He has already published several books with Prestel, which include: Albrecht Durer, The World of the Saints, I Titian, and Erotic Sketchbooks from Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Oskar Kokoschka, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, and Edgar Degas.