Rhine bridge in Cologne

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The Cathedral Bridge in Cologne, Hohenzollern Bridge
Rhine bridge in Cologne
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , 1914
Oil on canvas
120.5 × 91 cm
New National Gallery , Berlin

Rheinbrücke in Cologne is an expressionist painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from 1914. It belongs to the cycle of street scenes, which was created from 1913 to 1915 and shows the Cologne Hohenzollern Bridge , seen from the Deutz side, with the well-known view of the towers of the Cologne Cathedral . In 1921 Ludwig Justi acquired it for the New Department of the National Gallery in Berlin in the Kronprinzenpalais . Today it is part of the Berlin New National Gallery .

Background and story

The picture was taken in May 1914 when Kirchner was in Cologne at the invitation of the patron and art collector Josef Feinhals to paint wall decorations for the exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund , in which Feinhals and his tobacco shop participated. Feinhals bought Kirchner's painting Das Boskett - Platz in Dresden as early as 1912 . In Cologne Kirchner also made three etchings with a similar motif and a lithograph of the painting . The exhibition Degenerate Art escaped the picture in 1937 - in contrast to many other works by Kirchner - only because a volunteer of the National Gallery in Berlin, the future art historian Wolfgang Schöne , the painting Rhine bridge in Cologne as well as pictures of other painters before the seizure Commission of the Nazis hid and partly against should have exchanged similar objects.

Description and interpretation

The painting is carried out using the technique of oil painting on canvas and measures 120.5 × 91 cm in portrait format. It is signed lower right with E. L. Kirchner and has the inventory number A II 319 of the Nationalgalerie. On the back of the canvas is another painting, Girl on the Beach, from 1913.

The picture precisely captures the almost exact alignment of the Hohenzollern Bridge, which had existed for three years at the time, on the cathedral, which in the background with its crossing tower forms the vanishing point of perspective. Until 1945, in addition to the four-track railway line, the bridge had a road bridge next to it with tram traffic, on whose footpath between the bridge arches the figures, a conspicuous woman in a bright red dress and hat and several men are sketched out in broad daylight . The railway is shown with a steam locomotive on the right edge. Other people can be seen on the road on the left. They are figures as they are also known from the Berlin street scenes, especially the painting Potsdamer Platz .

Kirchner himself describes his relationship to the dynamism of the big city with its traffic as " ecstatic ". The Rhine crossing at Cologne Cathedral was already a bottleneck with high traffic shortly before the First World War . The old cathedral bridge in the same place was no longer able to cope with the increasing traffic, it had to be replaced by a much larger structure. Kirchner's sketchy, nervous style of painting results from the hustle and bustle of the big city. The figures only appear as schemes. The formal concentration on the essential is evident in the narrowness of the iron construction , the arches of which seem to converge at an acute angle. The American art historian and editor of Kirchner's catalog of works, Donald Edward Gordon , writes about the painting that there are parallels to the Futurists in terms of spatial dynamics . However, not in the futuristic fixation on the representation of the industrial-technical, as is the case later with the similarly composed pictures by Joseph Stella , which show the Brooklyn Bridge in New York . Rather, Kirchner shows how the narrow figures are subject to the scale of technology . A sudden depth of perspective, caused by the arches of the bridge, brings the people into the pictorial foreground. The color of the painting consists of fine lavender tones that are interwoven with a dominant green, except in the sky , which in turn points to the later picture from Potsdamer Platz.

Provenance and exhibition

In 1909, Ludwig Justi replaced his predecessor Hugo von Tschudi as director of the National Gallery. He made sure that the classical Kronprinzenpalais Unter den Linden was redesigned under the name “New Department of the Berlin National Gallery” into a museum for contemporary art. Justi acquired the painting in 1921 for this collection. The exhibitions between 1919 and 1933 included works by the French Impressionists and, on the upper floor, Expressionist paintings by Emil Nolde , Erich Heckel and Kirchner.

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lucius Grisebach , Annette Meyer zu Eissen. Among employees by Ulrich Luckhardt: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. 1880-1938. National Gallery [u. a.], Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-7913-0488-7 , p. 207 (catalog for the exhibition Nationalgalerie Berlin, Staatl. Museen Preuss. Kulturbesitz, November 29, 1979– January 20, 1980 [and elsewhere]).
  2. ↑ Maike Steinkamp: The unwanted legacy: The reception of “degenerate” art in art criticism, exhibitions and museums of the Soviet occupation zone and the early GDR . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2008, ISBN 978-3-05-006217-4 , pp. 78, 136 ( p. 78 in Google book search, p. 136 in Google book search).
  3. ^ National Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage: Work texts: Stories of a collection. 1933-1945. [19. November 2015], p. 6 (section Erich Heckel (1883–1970), spring, 1918 ) ( PDF; 129 kB ; accessed on September 21, 2016).
  4. ^ Donald E. Gordon: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With a critical catalog of all paintings. From the English by Lucius Grisebach. Prestel, Munich 1968, DNB 456784764 (original title: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; in the Gordon catalog no. G. 387 v ).
  5. ↑ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Hieroglyphs. In: art - the art magazine . Press release on the exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart , Berlin, 23 September 2016–12. February 2017 ( art-magazin.de ( Memento from September 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive )).
  6. ↑ Partly from: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Hieroglyphs. In: art - the art magazine . Press release on the exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 23 September 2016–12. February 2017 ( art-magazin.de ( Memento from September 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive )), and the catalog from 1979/80.
  7. ↑ Donald E. Gordon (Ed.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With a critical catalog of all paintings. Translated from the English by Lucius Grisebach. Prestel, Munich 1968, p. 103 f.
  8. ↑ Daniel Schreiber: The rescue of painting. A large overview by impressionists and expressionists in Berlin tells of the birth of modernity from the spirit of trench warfare. In: Weltkunst. Edition summer 2015: United: Impressionists and Expressionists in Berlin. P. 9, column 1 ( PDF; 849 kB ). In: Meisterkreis-germany.com, accessed on September 21, 2016 (the picture Rheinbrücke in Cologne p. 3).
  9. ↑ Maike Steinkamp: The unwanted legacy: The reception of “degenerate” art in art criticism, exhibitions and museums of the Soviet occupation zone and the early GDR . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2008, ISBN 978-3-05-006217-4 , pp. 321 ( p. 321 in the Google book search): "This was the first time since 1945 that Expressionism paintings were also hanging in the Nationalgalerie."
  10. ↑ Carter B. Horsley: Arcadia and Metropolis. Masterworks of German Expressionism From the National Gallery [sic!] Berlin. In: thecityreview.com, accessed September 21, 2016.
  11. ^ Hans-Dieter Fronz: Melancholic Modernism. “Modern times”: The Berlin New National Gallery in the Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall. In: Badische Zeitung . July 8, 2014 ( badische-zeitung.de [accessed September 21, 2016]).
  12. ↑ Angelika Wesenberg: Exhibitions - Old National Gallery: Impressionism - Expressionism. Art turn. In: Museum journal. Reports from the museums, castles and collections in Berlin and Potsdam. At the same time »Berlin museums, 6th part«. Vol. 29, 2/2015, ISSN  0933-0593 , pp. 66-69 ( PDF; 7.2 MB ( memento of April 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 21, 2016).