Kirchner in Dresden

Abstract

With its national groups and movements and its international exhibitions and manifestos, the decade from 1905 to 1914 appears in retrospect to have been one of the major turning-points in post-Renaissance European painting. The artistic styles, the attitudes and aesthetics established then have remained relevant, in their basic essentials, to artists of later twentieth century generations (including our own). Yet we possess surprisingly little concrete knowledge of the art of the period outside of Paris. The Künstler-Gruppe Brücke, for example, was founded in Dresden more than sixty years ago as one of the first of these consciously modern groups; yet until recently little has been known with documented certainty about the Brücke's early art. In part this has been due to the chronological ambiguities surrounding the early development of the Brücke's central figure, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.¹ Despite important European research and publication in the past decade,² the major documents pertaining to Kirchner's development have remained largely inaccessible—in the Kirchner Estate and related Archive,³ and especially in the city of Dresden itself.⁴ With the recovery and correlation of these documents, we can hope to establish at least what happened in Dresden and when, thus providing a chronological framework for the origins of modern painting in Germany.