b. Aschaffenburg, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire 1880

A leading figure in the early-20th-century German Expressionist group Die Brücke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner produced paintings, prints, and sculptures that opposed the conventions of academic art. His nudes, landscapes, and scenes of urban life on the eve of World War I are known for their unsettling effects of psychological tension and eroticism, while his powerful, crudely executed black-and-white woodcuts illustrated many books and magazines, including Germany’s leading avant-garde periodical Der Sturm. Albrecht Dürer was a lifelong influence on Kirchner, but painters such as Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, as well as African and Polynesian art, inspired his use of bright colors, simplified forms, and malevolent, mask-like faces. His art was labeled as “degenerate” by the Nazis in the 1930s, and he would commit suicide in 1937. In 1969, a major retrospective of paintings, drawings, and prints traveled to the Seattle Art Museum, the Pasadena Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1992, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, held a monographic show, using its existing collection; a major international loan exhibition took place in 2003. In November 2006 at Christie's, Kirchner's Street Scene, Berlin (1913) fetched $38 million, a record for the artist. From 3 August to 10 November 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a major exhibition that "probably comprises the very best of his oeuvre."

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