Louis de Marsalle

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Louis de Marsalle (born January 1, 1804 , † after 1936 , but officially already in January or February 1933 ) is a pseudonym of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner . He used this fictional person to write about himself and built her up for the purpose of commercialization as an art critic , in today's sense almost to a brand .

It is not possible to determine exactly when the two fictitiously met for the first time. De Marsalle first published about Kirchner in 1920, which indicated that they had already met in 1917/18 when Kirchner was spending his time in the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance , but joint work probably goes back even further. Kirchner reported that de Marsalle, who was born in France, had bought a watercolor from him and announced that he would henceforth "want to write about the master's art". Kirchner wrote to Ernst Gosebruch on January 21, 1920 : “I met a French poet here. I am amazed and happy how he thinks and writes calmly, objectively, unassuming, understandable about art. He is very interested in my work and will write about my drawings. ”Confidence in the existence of de Marsalle in art circles around Kirchner waned over time, because nobody knew him and he was never present at exhibitions. Kirchner excused him by pointing out that he had just left for North Africa and would not be back for a few months. In order to anticipate further questions, so Thorsten Sadowsky, director of the Kirchner Museum , let Ernst Ludwig Kirchner de Marsalle die in early 1933.

Life

De Marsalle is the son of Toussaint Bréda of black African descent, also known as François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture , who died of exhaustion on April 7, 1803 in the dungeons of Château de Joux in the French part of the Jura Mountains . The national hero of Haiti is considered a victim of Napoleon Bonaparte .

Kirchner sketched him for the first time as an artist in the Berlin Schumann Circus , on a tour in Dresden ; later he was a model for him even more often. According to de Marsalle, Kirchner saw in him “the wild man, someone who crawled through the woods with the philosopher Rousseau on all fours and bathed naked in cold lakes. I couldn't help him there, but at least he learned archery from me. ”In 1915 there was a brief reunion when Kirchner moved to Berlin , but it wasn't until 1920 when de Marsalle visited Kirchner's cure on Lake Constance that they really got together.

After this meeting, de Marsalle organized contacts with important artists in Paris without naming his client. In the following time de Marsalle made several trips to northern Africa, but was repeatedly in Davos to appraise Kirchner's new works and to write about them. The last meeting between the two took place in Chur in 1936 , where the Wilhelm Gustloff case was heard against David Frankfurter .

reception

Kirchner himself translated de Marsalle's texts into German. Weikop suspects that Kirchner's “greatest trickery trick”, the creation of this fictional character, came to him when he wrote the history of the bridge (1913). Kirchner's seclusion in the Swiss Alps since 1917, coupled with his egocentric view, may have contributed to feeling the need to market oneself in the media. With the help of this alter ego, the painter, who was also a gifted writer, as his extensive legacy of letters shows, had the support of a foreigner whose criticism was positive. In Kirchner's opinion, the French art scene was judged to be higher at that time. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, art critics had a great deal of responsibility, most of the art magazines were still published without any images and the imagination of those interested in art was therefore entirely based on the descriptive language of the art critic. "The economic nature of the artist, his possibility of survival, arose from his self-confidence, from his powers of persuasion and his ability to speak."

literature

swell

  • Rose-Carol Washton Long et al .: German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism . University of California Press, 2nd edition 1995, ISBN 978-0-520202-64-1 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ In the printed exhibition catalog on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the Kunsthalle Bern , which began on March 5, 1933, de Marsalle wrote the introductory text. A Latin cross was printed behind his name .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Christian Weikop : Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as his own critic: The artist's statements as stratagem of self-promotion . Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 48, No. 4. Advance Access Publication, September 26, 2012, pp. 406-420.
  2. ↑ During a museum tour through his house on September 30, 2016.
  3. ↑ a b Louis de Marsalle. Air de Davos . A life story. Published by the Kirchner Museum , Davos 2016
  4. ^ Roland Scotti: Art criticism in France between 1886 and 1905 . IT Verlag, Mannheim 1994, ISBN 3-9803035-1-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Marsalle, Louis de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Art critic and pseudonym Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1804
DATE OF DEATH 20th century