Kirchnerhaus
The Kirchnerhaus in Aschaffenburg is the birthplace of the German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) at Ludwigstrasse 19. In 2013, the association “KirchnerHAUS Aschaffenburg” set up a documentation room on the painter's childhood in the former apartment of the Kirchner family.
Kirchner in Aschaffenburg
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born on May 6, 1880 in this house at the Bavarian-Prussian border station in Aschaffenburg and spent the first six years of his life there. The address at that time was Große Bahnhofsstraße 217 D. The family's place of residence had a major influence on Kirchner's early artistic development. In his 1919 sketchbook he noted:
“I just want to tell how I came to be a painter. From the age of 3 I always wanted to ... to portray the wonders my eye saw in nature. [As] a pad of paper I got myself old convent paper and with the red-blue pencil I tried my hand at the locomotives that drove past my window and the very large houses and the women with the umbrellas that walked along the train station ... "
In 1930 Kirchner wrote in his Davos diary: “I was born at the train station. The first thing I saw in life were the locomotives and trains in motion. I drew them when I was three years old. Perhaps it is because of the observation of the movement that stimulates me to create. It gives me the heightened attitude towards life, which is the origin of the artistic work. ”The motif of the moving train can be seen in Kirchner's painting Rheinbrücke in Cologne , among other things .
The building
The Kirchnerhaus was built in 1862 almost at the same time as the railway station building opposite in the classical style. There was a large garden at the back of the house. A brick wall facing Bahnhofstrasse protected the residents from the noise and smoke of the passing trains. The house has a central projectile and two dormer windows . On the first floor, where the Kirchners lived in a 160 square meter apartment, there is a balcony with iron brackets and railings. The central projection of the top floor has the shape of a dominant transverse gable. In the two world wars, the house was almost undamaged and is therefore in its original condition. A three-storey annex was added around 1950, and the extension was used as a car repair shop and gas station. For Kirchner's 75th birthday on May 6, 1955, the Aschaffenburg History and Art Association had a memorial plaque attached to the building. The city of Aschaffenburg bought the building in 2011 and had it renovated in 2012 in accordance with a listed building . In the course of this renovation and after an arcade was moved out, the large shop windows at the front were dismantled and the house returned to its original state.
Todays use
In 2013, the KirchnerHAUS Aschaffenburg association, founded in 2011, opened a documentation room on Kirchner's childhood on the first floor. At the beginning of 2014, additional rooms on the ground floor were rented for exhibitions, lectures and events. In 2015, the exhibition "Originals from private ownership in Kirchner's birthplace" was on view on the ground floor, and two exhibitions are planned annually. In the building there is also a library that contains around 1200 titles, including primary literature by the artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel , Fritz Bleyl , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , Otto Mueller , Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein , scientific secondary literature as well as catalogs of works, exhibition and Sales catalogs etc.
Individual evidence
- ^ Homepage of the Kirchnerhaus Aschaffenburg , accessed on October 1, 2016
- ^ "Initiative Kirchnerhaus sucht Mitstreiter" , article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 5, 2011, accessed on October 1, 2016
- ^ "Back to the beginning" , article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 23, 2015, accessed on October 1, 2016
Coordinates: 49 ° 58 ′ 47.5 " N , 9 ° 8 ′ 26.6" E