Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes

[carving a sculpture in wood] is such a sensual pleasure when blow by blow the figure grows more and more from the trunk.

Down there it's still Summer, I suppose, whereas our sun [in Switzerland] is already gilding the mountains and the larches are turning yellow, but the colours are wonderful, like old, dark red satin. Down here in the valley the huts stand out in the strongest Paris blue against the yellow fields. Here one really learns the values of the individual colours for the first time. And the harsh, monumental lines of the mountains.

A primitive power of artistic sensuousness speaks from the prints, which itself develops directly from the graphic technique that is tied to painstaking effort. Like the 'savage' who with patience cuts the figure.. ..out of the hard wood, so the artist creates perhaps his purest and strongest pieces.. ..following the primordial curse, if one may so understand it: from the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread.

Nowhere does one come to know an artist better than in his prints [and] the woodcut is the most graphic of the print processes.

..art is made by man. His own figure is the center of all art.. .Therefore one must begin with the man himself.

Quote from 'Ein neuer Naturalismus? Eine Rundfrage des Kunstblatts', in 'Das Kunstblatt' 9, 1922; p. 375

to study the nude, the foundation of all pictorial art, in total freedom and naturalness. From.. ..this basis there emerged the feeling, shared by all, of taking creative stimulus from life itself and submitting to the decisive experience.

[that all differences among the former Brücke members should be put in the past and that] ..every individual conflict must be silenced and that everyone join together in the name of the whole, that is for our modern German art.

[that] simple people brought their bodies and shared their scanty bread with the artists. Kirchner learned the course of life again in their houses.

I find it increasingly necessary to express my ideas first in engraving or lithography so that they may develop before I start to paint. Every year my form and expression become more sensitive, and my ideas frequently have to pass through three graphic stages before I can start on the canvas.. .I can hear you say no, that is impossible because the value of the colors demands quite different treatment from black and white, but it is the inner idea that I try to establish firmly through graphic preparation.

The bleak and yet so intimate nature of the mountains has had an enormous impact on the painter. It has deepened his love for his subjects and at the same time purged his vision of everything that is secondary. Nothing inessential appears in the paintings, but how delicately every detail is worked out! The creative thought emerges strongly and nakedly from the finished work. Kirchner is now so taken up with entirely new problems that one cannot apply the old criteria to him if one is to do justice to his work. Those who wish to classify him on the strength of his German paintings will be both disappointed and surprised. Far from destroying him, his serious illness has matured him. Besides his work on visible life, creativity stemming solely from the imagination has opened up its vast potential to him – for this the brief span of his life will probably be far from sufficient.

I begin with movement.. .I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement..

The heaviest burden of all is the presence of the war and the increasing superficiality. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival.. .I am now like the whores, I once painted [in his Berlin-time]: the merest brushstroke now, gone tomorrow. Nonetheless I am still trying to put my thoughts in order and, from all the confusion, create an image of time, which is my task, after all.

Only the artist who has a love and an aptitude for craftsmanship should make prints; only when the artist truly prints himself does the work earn the name original print.

I found it very difficult to suddenly depart [from Berlin] since this year I had risen completely in the landscape and life and hardly needed awareness to access this place.