NARRATOR:
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Bathers Beneath Trees is a vivid example of how this German Expressionist’s images project an aggressive forcefulness. He distorted anatomy, scale, and perspective, and used strong colors and jagged angular brushstrokes. Like Kirchner’s exotic nudes, the opulent foliage and the canopy of trees appear wild and uncivilized. Behind them, a steep blue oval horizon rears up.
Kirchner’s recurring subjects are nudes, mountainous landscapes, and city streets. His paintings are directly related to his woodcuts, filled with violence and angst. Carving in wood to make these prints inspired him to reach his artistic goal.
KIRCHNER (ACTOR):
“If one traces the curves in the human body, one is led to the origins, to the spiritual energy that generated these forms and folds.”
NARRATOR:
In 1905, eight years before he made this painting, Kirchner organized Die Brucke, or The Bridge, in Dresden, with Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. These earliest exponents of German Expressionism introduced modern art into Germany. They were strongly influenced by the work of van Gogh and Gauguin, and owe as much to German art, especially the late Gothic.
After being drafted into the army during World War I, Kirchner suffered a nervous breakdown. He sought refuge in Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1938. By the mid-1930s, the Nazis had labeled German Expressionism “decadent.” Kirchner’s works were under attack; many were later confiscated.
Bathers Beneath Trees, Fehmarn
1913
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938)
On View
For this scene of nudes in a landscape, Kirchner reimagined the Baltic island of Fehmarn as a lush, tropical paradise. A founding member of the German Expressionist collective Die Brücke (The Bridge), Kirchner drew inspiration for his fractured forms and brash palette from both the “primitive” nonwestern art he encountered in Germany’s anthropological museums and the Post-Impressionist French pictures recently exhibited at galleries in Berlin and Dresden. Here Kirchner’s slashing brushstrokes betray a debt to Cézanne, while green and orange flesh tones suggest the influence of Van Gogh. But the determining inspiration seems to have come from Gauguin, whose conjuring of a premodern paradise in the pictures he painted on the island of Tahiti during the 1890s encouraged Kirchner to envision the considerably less distant and exotic island of Fehmarn where the German painter spent his summer holidays as a land of “South Sea opulence.”
Details
- Artist Name: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938)
- Title: Bathers Beneath Trees, Fehmarn
- Date: 1913
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 59-1/2 x 47-1/2 in. (151.1 x 120.7 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.1994.1.P
- Copyright: © (for works by E. L. Kirchner) by Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer, Wichtrach/Bern
Object Information
Estate of the artist in 1938;
Estate of artist’s wife, Erna Kirchner until 1945;
Basle Art Museum (maintaining estate) 1945/46-1954;
Brothers of artist, Biberach, Germany, 1954-1955;
[Roman Norbert Ketterer, Lago di Lugano, Switzerland (executor of artist’s estate), 1955-1969];
The Norton Simon Foundation, 1969-1994, transferred to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Estate of artist’s wife, Erna Kirchner until 1945;
Basle Art Museum (maintaining estate) 1945/46-1954;
Brothers of artist, Biberach, Germany, 1954-1955;
[Roman Norbert Ketterer, Lago di Lugano, Switzerland (executor of artist’s estate), 1955-1969];
The Norton Simon Foundation, 1969-1994, transferred to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
- Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, 2000-03-12 to 2000-07-02
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum,1989, p. 179
- Ketterer, R. N., Moderne Kunst VI,no. 40 p. 71
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best,2010, cat. 645 p. 322
- Jill Lloyd and Janis Staggs, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,2019, Fig. 18 p. 46, p. 48; p. 48 (ill)
- Apollonio, Umberto, "Die Brücke" e la cultura dell'espressionismo,no. 42
- Grohmann, Will, E. L. Kirchner, p. 96
- Gordon, Donald E., Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,no. 357 p. 371
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