Lot Essay
At the outbreak of the First World War, Kirchner volunteered for service as a driver in an artillery regiment, but by 1915 he was sent on sick leave due to a lung infection and general physical and nervous debility. There followed various stays in sanatoriums but these failed to cure his nervous condition which was worsened by his fear of forced military conscription. Three times between 1915 and 1916 Kirchner travelled from Berlin to the Kohnstamm sanatorium in Königstein near Frankfurt. Although this is a period of small artistic output, the intensity and quality of Kirchner's work was considerably increased. His paintings from these years also show a number of developments in style which prefigure his later oeuvre.
In a letter written in 1986 when the painting left the Albright-Knox Gallery, Professor Donald E. Gordon writes: "This painting, taken from Kirchner's "Berlin Period" is historically and ideologically more significant than work from his earlier "Dresden Period". It is the underlying quest for spirituality which makes the Berlin period so important...By spirituality I do not mean religiousity, nor specifically the Red Church in the painting, but rather a concern with the ultimate limits of materialism and with the ultimate questions of mortal existence. It is particularly the conflict between the peaceful, everyday life of the pedestrians in Königstein and the apocalyptic transformations of the city's perspective and cloud configurations".
Other townscapes from this period, such as Roter Turm in Halle (Gordon no. 436, housed in the Folkwang Museum, Essen), and Brandenburger Tor, Berlin (Gordon no. 437), are painted from a strongly distorted perspective: either from a bird's eye view or from below and looking upwards, in both cases shortening the distance. This expressionistic technique, which was becoming characteristic of Kirchner's style, was particularly successful in the depiction of townscapes, creating a very dynamic, almost abstract vision.
As Gordon writes, "Königstein, located in the Taunus Mountains just northwest of Frankfurt, offered hilly vistas with high horizons occasionally interrupted by dominant peaks, which contrasted strongly with the gently rolling landscape common to Saxony and Fehmarn and the flat Brandenburg plain surrounding Berlin. In the small town of Königstein and in the intimate countryside of the Taunus region, Kirchner must have been surprised to find in reality those sharply dropping ground planes and vertically shifting vantage points which he had constructed from imagination in the earlier years". (D. E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 105).
Kirchner's graphic work was proportionately greater in these years than his oils, although the most important pictorial ideas tended to originate in drawings and paintings, transferred to the graphic media later. Kirchner executed a woodcut entitled Alte Gasse in Königstein (Dube 296) in the same year he painted Königstein mit roter Kirche and the similarities in subject and style between the two works are self-evident. The sharp diagonals of Kirchner's stylised, distorted landscapes translate well into woodcut. Another hallmark of Kirchner's Berlin style, departing from the Dresden usage of primary hues in supplementary or complementary combination, is his limitation of each painting to hues adjacent on the colour circle. This is beginning to develop in Königstein mit roter Kirche. In this work, the interplay of blues, greens and mauves, punctuated by a blazing yellow, is particularly striking. The centrally placed church and main street are coloured in mauve and a very deep blue, flanked by varying shades of greens and blues on either side, with intense yellow clouds dominating the sky above, balanced by splashes of the same hue in the street below and at the window to the right. The careful arrangement of form and colour complement each other perfectly.
In a letter written in 1986 when the painting left the Albright-Knox Gallery, Professor Donald E. Gordon writes: "This painting, taken from Kirchner's "Berlin Period" is historically and ideologically more significant than work from his earlier "Dresden Period". It is the underlying quest for spirituality which makes the Berlin period so important...By spirituality I do not mean religiousity, nor specifically the Red Church in the painting, but rather a concern with the ultimate limits of materialism and with the ultimate questions of mortal existence. It is particularly the conflict between the peaceful, everyday life of the pedestrians in Königstein and the apocalyptic transformations of the city's perspective and cloud configurations".
Other townscapes from this period, such as Roter Turm in Halle (Gordon no. 436, housed in the Folkwang Museum, Essen), and Brandenburger Tor, Berlin (Gordon no. 437), are painted from a strongly distorted perspective: either from a bird's eye view or from below and looking upwards, in both cases shortening the distance. This expressionistic technique, which was becoming characteristic of Kirchner's style, was particularly successful in the depiction of townscapes, creating a very dynamic, almost abstract vision.
As Gordon writes, "Königstein, located in the Taunus Mountains just northwest of Frankfurt, offered hilly vistas with high horizons occasionally interrupted by dominant peaks, which contrasted strongly with the gently rolling landscape common to Saxony and Fehmarn and the flat Brandenburg plain surrounding Berlin. In the small town of Königstein and in the intimate countryside of the Taunus region, Kirchner must have been surprised to find in reality those sharply dropping ground planes and vertically shifting vantage points which he had constructed from imagination in the earlier years". (D. E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 105).
Kirchner's graphic work was proportionately greater in these years than his oils, although the most important pictorial ideas tended to originate in drawings and paintings, transferred to the graphic media later. Kirchner executed a woodcut entitled Alte Gasse in Königstein (Dube 296) in the same year he painted Königstein mit roter Kirche and the similarities in subject and style between the two works are self-evident. The sharp diagonals of Kirchner's stylised, distorted landscapes translate well into woodcut. Another hallmark of Kirchner's Berlin style, departing from the Dresden usage of primary hues in supplementary or complementary combination, is his limitation of each painting to hues adjacent on the colour circle. This is beginning to develop in Königstein mit roter Kirche. In this work, the interplay of blues, greens and mauves, punctuated by a blazing yellow, is particularly striking. The centrally placed church and main street are coloured in mauve and a very deep blue, flanked by varying shades of greens and blues on either side, with intense yellow clouds dominating the sky above, balanced by splashes of the same hue in the street below and at the window to the right. The careful arrangement of form and colour complement each other perfectly.