Ernst Ludwig Kirchner reinvents himself
The change to the 'New Style' in the midst of the Davos years Galerie Henze & Ketterer
Curated by Alexandra HenzeThe exhibition is dedicated to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s works of the so-called “New Style” – An artistic period that shaped his work from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. Spanning two floors, the concise presentation traces the defining features, developments, and distinctive qualities of this “New Style” through a selection of paintings on the ground floor and works on paper in the lower level. The aim is to give this period within Kirchner’s oeuvre the recognition it deserves.
With this exhibition, our gallery also contributes to the ongoing, in-depth discussion surrounding Kirchner’s work and the New Style – a discourse prominently reflected in current exhibitions such as Kirchner x Kirchner at the Kunst Museum Bern, Kirchner and Picasso at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster, Kirchner, Lehmbruck, Nolde at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, and at the Kirchner Museum Davos.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner came to Davos in 1917 to convalesce and found in the mountains surrounding the Alpine resort a new source of inspiration. Reinterpreting stylistic features he had brought with him from Berlin, he created, in his typically nervous manner, masterly landscapes with angular hatching and strong colour contrasts. The Berlin coquettes that had enlivened his famous street scenes slipped into the role of local peasant women; their punters became Alpine peasants pursuing their daily tasks. After Giovanni Giacometti, Giovanni Segantini, and Ferdinand Hodler, the big-city artist developed into a major interpreter of Alpine vistas: mountains, peasants and cows were staged, celebrated, and sublimated as central motifs of his work. The tranquillity and seclusion that Kirchner found in Davos encouraged and supported him into a new, equally convincing flowering of Expressionist vigour and intensity.
However, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner would not have been a master of his various media – painting, drawing, graphic art, sculpture, and photography – if he had not developed further, reinterpreting the majestic features of his early Davos period for a change in style, his New Style, that will be examined more closely in this exhibition. The artist had already been living on the outskirts of the Alpine town for several years and had captured his surroundings and life in the mountains in all its facets and from every angle when this change of style took place. The areas of colour in his paintings became calmer and more homogeneous, and were defined by intertwining concave and convex lines, with the result that broad, rounded forms alternated in strong colour contrasts, creating a monumental style of work.
Throughout his life Kirchner remained true to his choice of motifs. From his early beginnings in Dresden, through his Berlin years, the early Davos period and the New Style, to the late Davos period, he manically repeated portraits of bathers and nudes in landscapes, circuses, variety shows, or studio settings. Other favourite motifs were sporting events, often with horses, as well as fruit and flower still lifes, and mountain or city landscapes. These were now surrounded by shadows or auras of light, so that brightly lit areas and dark, shaded forms complemented each other – most intensively probably in the woodcuts produced during this period, which again influenced Kirchner’s painting. Here he developed his own technique of cutting up wooden blocks, which he then arranged like a jigsaw puzzle and printed in his studio in various shades of colour.
Thus from the mid-1920s we encounter a Kirchner who had completely reinvented himself and blossomed anew. He worked in his New Style until the mid-1930s, refining it and applying it imaginatively in all his techniques. The exhibition, featuring 17 paintings – including several rarely shown works – along with numerous works on paper, offers an impressive insight into the diversity of Kirchner’s subjects and techniques, bringing his “New Style” to life in all its facets.
We cannot strictly speak of a late style here, as Kirchner was only in his mid-40s to 50s at the time, i.e. in the prime of his creative life, but also because right at the end he again changed direction. While his works in the New Style simplified and abstracted the sense impressions underlying them, showing objects in multiple perspective, the very last works before the artist’s death again become more naturalistic. The New Style can therefore be seen as a completed phase that successfully demonstrates Kirchner’s drive to find his own artistic idiom. The artist sought and found his individual language and style, the expressive form that marks him as unique. Every work of this period possesses unmistakable characteristics that define it as a masterpiece of this particular creative phase.
Alexandra Henze
