Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the first pioneers of modern art. A founder of the revolutionary artists' group "die Breucke" (the bridge) in 1905, he set the intense and creative pace of German Expressionism in its first stage, and continued as a leader of the movement's growth. His style was individual from the beginning: compact, intense, angular and rhythmic.

Born in Aschaffenburg, of middle Germany, in 1880, Kirchner began painting and drawing on his own while still in school. In 1900, he went to Dresden as an architecture student, and it was there that Kirchner, along with Schmidt-Rottluff and Hejkel, began the first moidern art movement in northern Europe. These artists, joined by others involved in the vigorous phase of creative development, moved to Berlin in 1911. During the few years that poreceded World War I, Kirchner's painting became more dynamic, with a sense of animation drawn from complex balances of diagonals, and tightly controlled rythmic patterns.

HIs work became widely known, but just as with the French innovators of the period, it was most often condemned, and only rarely appreciated before the 1920's.

Brief military service had a ruinous effect on Kirchner's health, and in 1917 he moved to Switzerland for recovery, where he remained until his death in 1938. Here, the intense feeling of his earlier work ws carried on: the quality of powerful forces within nature are still present. But this intensity is modified, especially in the Swiss landscapes, with a balancing sense of enjoyment in nature and a harmony of man and animal.  Source: Bulletin, SUmmer 1964.