All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
– Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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SELF PORTRAIT WITH MODEL by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
ARTIST WITH MODEL by Bob Kessel
Born May 6, 1880, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner studied architecture and painting before forming the artists’ group Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) in Dresden on 7 June 1905, with Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Kirchner moved to Berlin in 1911, and within two years the group split.
Kirchner worked at a feverish pace, producing art that drew its subject matter from his studio life with artist friends and models, the street and nightclub life of the city, and summer trips to beaches. His works were exhibited and collected from 1905, and by the mid-teens Kirchner had a number of devoted collectors, both private and institutional.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Kirchner joined the German army, but eventually suffered a nervous breakdown. Despite ill health and struggles to recover, he continued to produce major paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture. In 1917 he moved to Davos, Switzerland, and began to include in his work images of rural life and the surrounding Alps. Through the 1920s major exhibitions of his work were held in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dresden, and other cities. In 1931 he was made a member of the Prussian Academy.
Labeled a degenerate artist by the Nazis, Kirchner was asked to resign from the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1933. In 1937, more than 600 of his works were confiscated from German museums and were either destroyed or sold, many ending up in America. In 1938 the psychological suffering caused by the Nazi authorities rejecting him as “un-German,” the dispersal and destruction of his works, and the Nazi occupation of Austria so close to his home in Davos led to Kirchner’s suicide.
BERLIN FRAU print by Bob Kessel exhibited at gallery show
BERLIN FRAU by Bob Kessel
GREEN GIRL by Bob Kessel
FRANZI by Bob Kessel
BARE BACK by Bob Kessel
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BRUCKE MADCHEN by Bob Kessel
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ZWEI NACKTEN FRAUEN by Bob Kessel
