The artist’s problem, as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner saw it, was “how to arrest in a few bold strokes a movement, catching the passing moment.” To him, in 1900, the paintings in museums were “anemic, bloodless, lifeless studio daubs,” while on the streets of Dresden, “life—noisy, colorful, pulsating,” cried to be painted. Kirchner was not alone in his ambition, but of all the German expressionists who sprang up before World War I, few are enjoying quite such a vogue as Kirchner today.

Building a Bridge. The son of an engineer in a paper plant, Kirchner studied architecture at his father’s insistence, but switched to painting as soon as he got his diploma. In 1905 he and three former fellow students set up a studio in an empty Dresden butcher shop, proclaimed themselves the leaders of a new movement that they called Die Brücke (The Bridge). The movement had only the haziest of programs: it simply wanted to attract “revolutionary and fermenting elements” who would build a kind of bridge into the future.

The members of Die Brücke endlessly read Verlaine, Rimbaud, D’Annunzio and Nietzsche. They drank into the night, took midnight swims with their female models, absorbed everything from the fiery swirls of Van Gogh to the dramatic African masks that were being displayed in the Dresden Zoological and Ethnographical Museum. By 1911, when they decamped to Berlin. Kirchner had developed a boldly distinctive style of his own, and he had begun painting the famed street scenes that were to be his forte (see color).

Pounding on Nerves. Along with his fellow expressionists, he was trying not so much to paint reality as to convey the sensation that reality inspired in him. While the contemporary French impressionists were often methodically scientific, the German expressionists were both romantic and subjective. Every stroke of the brush was meant to intensify emotion, as if nature were pounding upon raw nerves. Kirchner used quick, jagged strokes that gave his paintings a staccato rhythm. His long and pointed figures had a certain elegance, but they were also painfully intense. As for color, Kirchner sometimes seemed wholly arbitrary: a face could be plum purple or brown; a sidewalk could be candy pink or apple green. The whole idea was to enhance the mood.

The mood of most of Kirchner’s painting is a feverish foreboding, and it was natural that it should be so. In 1914, after volunteering for the artillery. Kirchner had a nervous breakdown and was found to be suffering from tuberculosis. From then on, his life became a battle against alcohol, dope, and, in his last years, the Nazis. In 1937 the Nazis removed 639 of his works from German museums; 32 were displayed in the notorious Munich exhibit of “degenerate art.” Less than a year later, at the age of 58, Kirchner ended his life by shooting himself.

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