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Rating: "...with faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators, we call upon all youth to unite. As young people, we are the bearers of the future and we want to create FOR OURSELVES freedom of life and movement against the forces that have long been in power. Anyone who reproduces that which leads them to create in a direct and autonomous way, is ONE OF US".
Die Brucke - "The Bridge" - in Dresden was this: attracting creative instincts from various places, even protean and/or contrasting, channeling inspiration from multiple sources, suggesting even just an unexplored path of possible openness. Overcoming conventions and mannerisms, surpassing the old and determining an undefined unexpressed "new": in one phrase, climbing on Zarathustra's bridge above seas of Dionysian madness, leaving behind the Apollonian monotony of the academy; in one word, "progressing". It was anxiety, feverish delirium, spasmodic and eager need for expression at all costs, a voracious but insatiable desire for discovery, the search for the never-tried exotic, nonconformity, rebellion, schizophrenia.
In other words: the essence of E.L. Kirchner's art, who committed suicide before the age of 60 after an uneven struggle with brutal depression; a fervent interventionist at the dawn of the Great War, he did not pass the medical examinations. They sent him back home for health reasons, and on the clinical record it was written: "mental insanity". A different one, an unframed, least of all an integrated one, a loose cannon eternally on the verge of exploding. Creator and uncontrollable propellant of what would become the emblem of "degenerate art" for Nazism.
Take a look at this oil on canvas, year 1913. One meter and 20 x 81 centimeters: large dimensions, devastating visual/emotional impact. Five female figures. "Figures", indeed, or "silhouettes" - if you prefer - before they are human subjects. But we'll get to that. At first glance: sharp, rugged, angular lines; a sense of enraged speed as a result of an outburst, almost as if the brush was still sizzling coarsely on the surface. Five figures placed within a geometric and artificial space, laid within an imaginary rhomboidal container whose lower point is perceivable on the lower part of the canvas. Exuberant abundance of acute angles, hysterical zig-zag of harsh geometries, a panting chase of ogival arches stolen from Mitteleuropean Gothic (no coincidence, the work is in Cologne). The old is there, then, it hasn't disappeared - but it's out of context; and the result is hallucinatory, disturbing.
Nervous colors, absolute supremacy of several shades of green; but there's something else, something very strange upon closer inspection: the background reaches the eye before (and more aggressively than) the foreground and the subject itself - it's the complete reversal of common perspective, it's the breaking of convention. Beyond the metaphor, this means: it's an upside-down world, the known and recognized ethics cannot be considered a valid system, unless you read it backwards. Green, indeed: successive and progressive gradations up to a blinding acid. One single exception: the pallor of five faces hidden and deformed by heavy makeup. Absent faces, essentially expressionless, inanimate and depressed sensuality masked in greasepaint. Elongated in profile, vertically offset like the figures themselves, distorted evolutions of Egyptian silhouettes stripped of all balance and harmony. Not a hint of sweetness, not a semblance of femininity: they are the sick version of their Avignon cousins. Not faces, but masks: tribal, primitive, pre-social masks: Kirchner admired similar ones at the Dresden Ethnographic Museum, where the sculptures of remote Palau also offered themselves to his Genius.
What remains is a disturbing synecdoche of urban life: not the whole, but a sample of it; not the crowd so adored by the new "prophets" of the masses, only five women and the barely perceivable wheel of a car on the left. Five women. Prostitutes? Perhaps. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Perhaps merely tired bourgeois women, falsely "chic", detached while ignoring each other, likely Berlin-born but "Parisian" by adoption - especially in attire. Dimmed Narcissuses rather than dazzling fireflies of a street sparkling with electric (artificial too, then) glow from its lamps. The metropolis and the many souls without soul intent on crowding it, filling countless other rhomboid paintings, multiplying like mass-produced goods. Vacant exhibitionism, devoid of affection and communication. The greedy and mad Germany advancing with full sails towards war. Towards ruin. Kirchner was there, his madness immortalized this alienating scenario up close - filtering it. And his madness gave birth to this.
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