Works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made his first woodcuts as a schoolboy, guided by his father, and in 1905 helped found Die Brücke, a group of young artists that brought the old woodcut back into use.

The group first met in his studio, once a butcher's shop, and drew friends rather than hired models, in quarter-hour poses that kept the drawing quick. He spent the summers of 1907 to 1911 with other Brücke members by the Moritzburg lakes and on Fehmarn, where he took the nude outdoors. In the woodcut Fehmarn Girls of 1913, printed in black on yellow paper, the gouges leave jagged slivers of light across a grinning face, with a second face close behind it.

In 1913, two years after moving to Berlin, he began painting its streets, with prostitutes at their centre. In Five Women on the Street black coats and feathered hats turn the women into tall, pointed shapes against acid green, their faces pale masks. He volunteered for the army in 1914 and trained as a driver with the 75th Field Artillery until a breakdown got him discharged. Self-Portrait as a Soldier, from 1915, shows him in that uniform, a 75 on the shoulder strap and a cigarette in his mouth, holding up a red stump in place of a hand.

In 1918 he settled at Davos, first on a farm, painting mountains and farmers. In Winter Landscape in Moonlight of 1919 the snow is blue and the firs pink, and a yellow crescent moon sits in an orange cloud on a red sky. Paintings and prints come in roughly equal measure below, mostly of people, women above all.

Sources: Wikipedia, Detroit Institute of Arts, National Gallery of Art, Städel Museum, Museum Ludwig.