Page 55 - Studio International - July-August 1969

`As Kirchner, a young student of architecture paintings.3 They also led to bitter denuncia- Kirchner's own claims. It is true that he
and painting, looked at pictures by Leo Putz tions of Pechstein, the Brücke-member who studied primitive art and German Gothic
and Fritz Erler in the Munich Secession became successful first and the only one who painting and carving because he saw in them
around the turn of the century he recognized never denied his debt to Van Gogh and formal statements related to his own ideas, but
that only a new study of Nature and a new Gauguin. stylistic devices borrowed from these areas
attitude to life would bring the renewal to By 1911 all the Brücke painters had moved appear infrequently in Kirchner's painting.
German art that was so necessary ... Soon after- from Dresden to Berlin and each of them had The real influence on the more successful
wards he moved to Dresden and a circle of begun to modify their style. A great deal has Berlin pictures came from Cubism and
young artists formed around him. They were been written to explain Kirchner's gradual Futurism which Kirchner had seen at Her-
dissatisfied with their academic studies, move away from bright, juxtaposed colours warth Walden's Sturm Gallery and at the
adopted his working methods and with him and large flat areas of paint with emphasized famous Cologne Sonderbund exhibition of 1912.
created in the Brücke what is today known as the contours towards sharp angular forms, ner- There is scarcely an important contemporary
most German style in contemporary art:
"Expressionism". Of these artists only Nolde
and Kirchner have stayed the course.'1
This is an extract from an essay written in
1933 by Louis de Marsalle, a critic who had
often interpreted Kirchner's work in print
and who never made public statements on
any other artist. Louis de Marsalle often got
his facts wrong, but when he did it was always
in Kirchner's interest.
Louis de Marsalle's bias is less surprising if
you know that Marsalle was really Kirchner
writing under a pseudonym. He frequently
wrote about his own work in this way and
everything he wrote has the same self-assertive
tone, the same insistence on his own importance
and the same lack of recognition of the
achievements of all those associated with him.
Kirchner's insistence on making the world
recognize his greatness even in the face of the
evidence presents other difficulties. He per-
sisted in repainting early work or in pre-dating
it to make it look as though he was truly
radical much earlier than was in fact the case.
He also destroyed almost all of his earliest
drawings and paintings so that we now have
only an imperfect idea of how he developed
towards his first independent style.
Louis de Marsalle said that Kirchner had the
idea of renewing German art and this, at least,
seems to be true, although whether he (or any
other Brücke-member for that matter) actually
succeeded in doing so begs several vital
questions. What he without question did
bring off was to bring German art up to date,
to create a viable and individual style which
ran parallel to the most advanced develop-
ments abroad. In the light of German nine-
teenth-century painting which, for the most
part, lamely adopted French examples a
generation late, Kirchner's achievement was
considerable enough. But he was anxious to
claim much more, to assert that what he and
the Brücke had done was nothing less than the
creation of a new German national school
which had European significance. He even
went further and stated that the formal device
of his own invention, the 'Hieroglyph', was as
important a contribution to modern painting vous cross-hatched brushstrokes and a more 1
Untitled 1968-9
as Cezanne's cylinder and sphere and Seurat's limited range of colours. Much has also been reinforced resin
Divisionist technique.2 said about the introduction of city-subjects 5 x 3 ft x 6 in.
Such inflated claims led to heated controver- into his work: about the move from the studio 2
Ema With Cigarette 1915
sies in which Kirchner denied any knowledge into the streets, cabarets and variety-halls. oil on canvas
of precisely those French Post-impressionists But in all this the obvious sources for the new 28}x 24 in.
on whose work he had based his first Brücke style have been played down in keeping with