Retreat to Nature: Kirchner’s Landscapes
by Shalini Le Gall
Susan Donnell and Harry W. Konkel Curator of European Art and Director of Academic Engagement
Like many of us at this moment, I find myself retreating to nature whenever possible to process, and escape, the challenges of our world. Sometimes this escape takes the form of a walk outside, but it can also be as simple as lingering next to an open window or being in close proximity to houseplants. During these breaks, I’ve been reminded that artists have also historically sought nature’s relief during times of crises, knowing that it was both an opportunity to rest and a chance to see and picture landscapes differently.
A member of the vibrant German Expressionist group of artists in the early 20th century, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner suffered a mental breakdown during World War I. Although he had volunteered for military service in 1914, by 1915 he was recuperating in a sanitorium and spent the next several years in and out of institutions in Germany and Switzerland. Yet he continued to make art, including landscapes, based on environments that seemed unaffected by the violence and destruction around him. These works of art were not simply expressions of an artist’s mental decline, rather they connected to larger traditions of landscape representation in European art.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Germany, 1880 - 1938), Striding Bathers in the Woods (In der Walde Schreitende Badens), 1910, etching on wove paper, 9 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches. Gift of David and Eva Bradford, 2003.34.2
Before the war, Kirchner had already made paintings and prints of abstract landscapes as a member of the Brücke artists’ group, inspired by the works of Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and others. The group also had access to ethnographic collections of objects brought back from regions of Africa and Asia that were increasingly controlled by European empires. Taken together, these sources informed many of the early Expressionist principles. Kirchner’s paintings were filled with angular forms and earthy tones, and the brushwork often molded into blades of grass or tree blossoms. During this pre-war period, nature also sometimes crept into Kirchner’s work in unexpected ways, in the background of nude studies. In Striding Bathers in the Woods, three nude figures, each in distinct positions, walk through a wooded landscape, the geometric forms of their bodies mimicking the angularity of the trees and brush in the background. In Nudes Lying by the Sea the splayed bodies of the three figures are arranged diagonally, and their rounded forms echo the shape of the shore and the form of the waves. The abstraction of these nude bodies transform these human figures into extensions of a landscape that seems timeless and universal.
Yet Kirchner’s interest in landscape stemmed from uniquely German perspectives on the environment. In response to the perceived decadence of the emerging urban bourgeois lifestyle, back to nature movements linked to nudism and traditional agriculture developed throughout Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his influential Return to Nature! Adolf Just wrote, “The more man sets his face again toward nature, the more his conscience and instinct will reawaken within him.”[i] Just and others railed against science, and promoted primarily vegetarian diets and natural methods of healing. In this way, men and women were encouraged to live in union with nature, and forests became especially important, both for their connection to Germanic fairy tales and history (think the Black Forest), and for their influence on German culture. Some strands of this movement would later filter into Nazi ideology, but at the turn of the century many German artists and writers were drawn to these reformist ideas that idealized nature in reaction to European modernization and industrialization.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Germany, 1880 - 1938), Sandberge, 1918, woodcut with watercolor on soft wove (blotting) paper, 15 inches. Gift of David and Eva Bradford, 2002.53.22
Given the significance of nature and landscape, both in the German tradition and in Kirchner’s own art prior to the war, it’s not surprising that he returned to the subject during his convalescence. Made in 1918, during his time in the Swiss Alps, Sandberge is a stunning landscape that explodes with colors and forms in abstract patterns. Yellow and orange radiate out from the center of the picture, while the green trees and arched blue sky frame the edges. As Peter Selz has written, “the earth itself seems to be turning” in this image.[ii] Kirchner was an accomplished printmaker, and part of a group of artists intent on reviving the woodcut technique—in which an image is carved in relief on a wooden block and then inked and printed on paper. The use of this technique recalled the work of Albrecht Dürer, a 15th-century German artist who gave visual form to compelling biblical narratives, in works such as Christ before the People. For Kirchner, the woodcut technique connected his work to contemporary German artists aligned with Dürer, and allowed him to open up the expressive possibilities of printmaking with a natural material. In Sandberge, the technique accentuates the sharp forms of the landscape and heightens the contrast between inked and non-inked surfaces of the block. As our eyes process this topsy-turvy landscape, we notice a solitary cross, perched on top of the hill, and consider what it meant to be a German artist in the Swiss Alps making such a scene during World War I.
If Sandberge offers a disoriented view of a Swiss landscape, it is perhaps a reminder that nature is not immune to the effects of our troubled minds. Increasingly aware of his fragile mental state after his discharge from the military, Kirchner wrote in 1916, “…I am still trying to put my thoughts in order and, from all the confusion, create an image of the times, which is my task, after all.”[iii] Nature might offer us some fixed points in the uncertain road ahead, but an “image of the times” will be ours to create.
[i] Adolf Just, “The Voices of Nature” in Return to Nature!, Benedict Lust, New York, 1903.
[ii] Peter Selz, “German Expressionist and Post-Expressionist Prints,” German Expressionist Graphics from the Bradford Collection, Portland Museum of Art, Maine, 2004, page 61.
[iii] Quoted in Roland Scotti, “War, Art and Crisis: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1914-1918,” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, eds. Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller, Royal Academy of Arts, 2003, page 28.