heritage and their separateness from the Italian Renaissance. For many in the early twentieth century, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, with its the harrowing image of Christ’s crucifixion epitomised the inherently expressive qualities of “German” art. Widely-read books, such as Wilhelm Worringer’s Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in Gothic) of 1912, presented an account of the Kunstwollen, or “will to art” of the German Gothic that chimed with the spirit of Expressionism. Kirchner kept a volume of Dürer’s drawings close at hand for much of his life. For artists such as Kirchner, Nolde and many others, these forefathers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exhibited qualities they sought to nurture in their own radical new work.
In 1910, Kirchner painted Standing Nude with Hat, a work that draws directly from a sixteenth-century image. He attached enormous emotional and professional importance to the painting, regarding it as one of his most significant early works and as an image of his ideal of feminine beauty at the time. The woman is Dodo, Kirchner’s then girlfriend, who appears in many of his Dresden works. However, Kirchner was working from another, much older “model” too – the seductively smiling Venus painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1532.
Erich Heckel, Windmill in Dangast, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 80.5 cm.
Wilhelm-Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg.
Gabriele Münter, Jawlensky and Werefkin, 1908–1909.
Oil on canvas, 32.7 x 44.5 cm.
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Otto Mueller, Bathers in Reeds.
Tempera on hessian, 92 x 79 cm.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
Kirchner’s nude is less “posed” than Cranach’s mythical beauty. But the sinuous line of Cranach’s nude is echoed in Kirchner’s. Both women wear fashionable, contemporary headwear and jewellery that, far from covering them, actually emphasises their nakedness. The courtly eroticism of the sixteenth century is brought up to date in the modern, bohemian context by the motifs, in the background interior of Kirchner’s atelier, of primitivised copulating couples on the drapes and walls. Kirchner would have been able to study the works of Cranach at close hand in Dresden and Munich, but he first came across Cranach’s Venus as a reproduction in the studio of his Brücke colleague, Otto Mueller. Later, when he saw the original on a visit to Frankfurt in about 1925, he sent a postcard to his companion, Erna: “Today I saw the beautiful Venus in the original. Pale pink against black”.
In a letter of 1933 to his long-standing friend and supporter, Dr. Carl Hagemann, who was based in Frankfurt and to whom Kirchner was selling the painting, he urged his patron to take the opportunity to compare his canvas with Cranach’s Venus, which hung in the city’s collection. Of his own painting, Kirchner gave a description in highly subjective, personalised and sexualised terms. Here, he was effectively reiterating a recurrent Expressionist theme – the desire to break down the boundaries between art and life – when he wrote:
“[It] has almost mysterious qualities that lie in the colours and give it a variable appearance, according to the lighting. Often, it almost steps out of the frame. When I once showed it to [the painter] Scherer from Basel, who is now dead, he first thought he saw a living woman and wanted to speak to her. My wife always says I have never again achieved an image of a woman like it, and there’s certainly a bit of jealousy involved with her there, since there are also some very beautiful nudes of her, such as the one you have. But perhaps she’s right, in as far as the first deep love of a woman’s body, which happens only once, has come into this picture”.
The German Expressionist fascination with the art of the Middle Ages was translated into one practice that, it might be argued, was the movement’s greatest aesthetic achievement. This was the stunning revitalisation of the woodcut medium. The woodcut printing technique, which reached its peak in the Gothic and was mastered so consummately by Dürer, had long been usurped by other techniques such as engraving, etching and lithography. The Brücke artists discovered in the woodcut medium the ideal vehicle for a raw, expressive physicality, boldness of design and immediacy of working. In some, they introduced blocks of colour. By giving a new priority within modernism to a print medium that was often marginalised, they challenged conventional hierarchical divisions in the arts. Many other artists of the era, from Kandinsky to Kollwitz, worked extensively with the woodcut. Works like Nolde’s Prophet of 1912 convey a strong sense of how a small, monochrome image could achieve a monumental effect, powerfully expressive of both the subject – the gaunt head of an ancient seer – and the hard wooden physicality of the hewn printing block. Evoking the messianic aspect of the Prophet, the critic Gustav Schiefler wrote in 1927: “Everything: beard, hair, background lines, appear in him to be reflected from an inner fire”.
A tiny woodcut, branding the newly-formed “Artists Union Brücke” with an image not much bigger than a large postage stamp, affirms the philosophy behind the Brücke’s name. The main image shows a bridge, at the apex of which a figure stands, arms raised to the sky or to the far shore. In the foreground, others look on. It has been interpreted as a representation of conventional bourgeois values on our near shore, with the bridge (Brücke) as the transforming way across to the far shore, signifying the revitalisation of art and life. What is generally agreed is that the name Brücke (always used without the definite article “die”) refers to a passage from the prologue to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Standing Nude with Hat, 1910–1920.
Oil on canvas, 205 x 65 cm.
Städel Museum, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt.
August Macke, Girls under Trees, 1914.
Oil on canvas, 119.5 x 159 cm.
Pinakothek der Moderne, Kunstareal München, Munich.
“Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss. …
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across [Übergang, also ‘transition’] and a down-going [Untergang, also ‘perishing’].
“I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a down-going, for they are those who are going across.
“I love the great despisers for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore”.
The central metaphor of the bridge, as the means for transformation – for the crossing to the “other bank” is reiterated a little further in the passage:
“I love him who keeps back no drop of spirit for himself, but who wants to be the spirit of his virtue entirely: thus he steps as spirit over the bridge. […]
“I love him whose soul is deep even in its ability to be wounded, and whom even a little thing can destroy: thus he is glad to go over the bridge”.
The “arrows of longing for the other bank” appear in Brücke iconography in numerous images of archery, the bows and arrows often wielded
