'Ecstasy of First Sight'...Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at Galerie St. Etienne
Galerie St. Etienne will present Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Featuring Watercolors and Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection, an exhibition including 30 never-before-seen sketches by the great German Expressionist, from March 29 through July 1, 2016.
Until recently, Lehman’s Kirchner drawings had been on extended loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The late collector purchased the works in 1959 as a group from a German dealer who obtained them from the artist’s estate. The exhibition explores the relationship between Kirchner’s sketches and his other work, presenting more than 50 pieces that span nearly his entire career, from 1906 through his Swiss exile in the 1930s. Also on view will be a selection of larger Kirchner drawings and a number of rare woodcuts, lithographs and etchings. Because Kirchner insisted on doing his own printing, most of his editions are extremely small, and some of the exhibited prints are unique or virtually unique. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Featuring Watercolors and Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection represents a rare opportunity to trace the development of Kirchner’s oeuvre. Sketching was central to the artist’s creative process. Rejecting academic life drawing practices, Kirchner sketched in quick 15-minute intervals. His goal was to capture what he called the “ecstasy of first sight,” the immediate emotions evoked by the experience. These unmediated sketches revealed what he was observing as well as the artist’s temperament. He thought of his sketches as a visual language more evocative than words, referring to them as “hieroglyphs.” The sketches were never studies per se, but rather initial steps toward perfecting expressive form. Emotional emphasis frequently overrode realistic proportions. The works on view reveal Kirchner’s range, influences, interests, and the progression of his draughtsmanship. The earliest work in the exhibition is a rare colored pencil sketch dating to 1906, done shortly after the founding of the Die Brücke (The Bridge) group in Dresden. The latest was done in Davos, Switzerland, during the artist’s exile from Nazi Germany, approximately two years before his suicide in 1938. In a recent interview, Andrew Robison, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., noted, “Kirchner’s reputation should be like Picasso’s, because Kirchner, in many ways, in the first part of the 20th century parallels Picasso in being the dominant artist for his country.” Galerie St. Etienne, located at 24 West 57th Street in New York City, is the oldest gallery in the United States specializing in Expressionism and Self-Taught Art. It was established in 1939 by Otto Kallir, previously founder of Neue Galerie in Vienna, a principal exponent of German and Austrian modernism.
