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 by vigorous Amazonian nudes. Heckel may have been the bearer of the impulse that led to the name. Kirchner remembered: “One day a young man declaiming loudly from Zarathustra, without a collar and tie, came up my steps and introduced himself as Erich Heckel”.
Max Pechstein, On the Banks of the Lake, 1910.
Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm.
Private collection.
Of all the literary and philosophical sources that were formative for the way Expressionism developed, it was Nietzsche’s writings and Nietzschean ideas that exerted the most seductive appeal. It has been argued that apart from Karl Marx, no other nineteenth-century German thinker has had a greater influence on the development of German thought (and Nietzsche’s works were hungrily devoured by many non-Germans too). Among the ideas that proved most alluring for artists were his diagnoses of the decadence of contemporary culture and his exaltation of creativity as a force pregnant with the potential for vital salvation. He championed instinct over morality. His writings proffered the idea that there were superior men of action who could rise above the crowd. His vitalism and ecstatic “Dionysian” affirmation of life, which embraced extremes of both joy and pain, fuelled Expressionism’s passion, while his damning indictment of conventional morality urged on its rebellion. The Expressionist artists and poets were working at a time when the “Nietzsche cult” was at its height. Popular representations of the philosopher reached outlandish heights (literally!) such as in an image from 1915 of a muscular, heroically idealised Nietzsche atop a Zarathustran mountain range. In 1950, Gottfried Benn, who had been one of the foremost poets of the Expressionist period, reflected:
“Actually, everything that my generation discussed, dissected in its deepest thoughts – one can say suffered through; one can say: enlarged upon – all of that had been already expressed and explored, had already found its definitive formulation in Nietzsche; everything after that was exegesis. His treacherous, tempestuous, lightning manner, his feverish diction, his rejection of all idylls and all general principles, his postulation of a psychology of instinctual behaviour as a dialectic – ‘knowledge as affect,’ all of psychoanalysis and Existentialism. They were all his achievements. As is becoming increasingly clear, he is the great giant of the post-Goethean era”.
When the young Paul Klee arrived in Munich in 1899, he noted in his diary “Nietzsche in the air. Glorification of the self and the instincts. Boundless sexual drives”.
Munich was the other major site of pre-war Expressionism’s flourishing. There, in the old capital of German art nouveau or Jugendstil, other shifting constellations of artists were working, exhibiting and exchanging ideas together in the rich cultural environment