Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Images of the Natural State

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German Expressionist artist and a founding member of the Die Brücke modernist movement. Kirchner was motivated by an impulse to revolt against the social restraints and conventions of Germany's Wilhelmine era. This prompted his unconventional lifestyle, which included seasonal outdoor excursions during which Kirchner visually documented his friends cavorting in the nude. This essay analyses the multifarious influences that informed Kirchner's depictions of outdoor nudes, such as Germany's naturalist movement, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and poems of Walt Whitman, the Fauvist aesthetics of Henri Matisse, the escapism of Paul Gauguin, and the visual idioms of non-western sculpture. Although Kirchner's depictions of nude figures synthesized many sources, the artist added his own touch and made a unique contribution to the art history canon expressing a distinctly modern mindset