Volume 50, Number 7 · May 1, 2003
The Instinct Artist
By Sanford Schwartz
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1880–1938
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,March 2–June 1, 2003, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, June 28–September 21, 2003
National Gallery of Art, 254 pp., $39.95 (paper)
The German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is an immensely likable figure whose work has running all through it a powerful idea at its core. Like other artists and writers born in the last decades of the nineteenth century, he believed that art could be a moral and political tool. He saw the making of pictures as a way to strike out at, and overturn, what were perceived to be the deadening values of a materialistic and sexually repressive society, and Kirchner's chief way of representing the unfettered and instinctive existence he sought was in the form of raw, seemingly impulsive and unfinished sketches—works we now can savor as some of the most virtuosic and elegant drawings produced in the twentieth century, but which originally had to have struck viewers as the brazen scratchings of a supreme con artist. Kirchner's drawings, and his related prints of all types, aren't necessarily his deepest work, but they are the objects that most bear out what Norman Rosenthal, in his introduction to the catalog of the Kirchner retrospective now at the National Gallery in Washington, means when he justly writes that the painter deserves a 'place in the pantheon of artists who changed the way the world was perceived.'
Review, 3934 words
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