There are few moments of joy during wartime. Yet Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Officer and waitress (Offizier und Kellnerin), 1915, is a vigorously ebullient painting, full of bright colour, energy and cheer, celebrating what, for the artist, was a moment of happiness and relief during the dark years of the First World War. In July 1915 Kirchner had been assigned as a recruit to the 75th Field Artillery Regiment in Halle an der Saale in the German state of Saxony- Anhalt. In September, after just a few months of training, Kirchner was discharged in order to receive psychiatric treatment; in November 1915 he was declared unfit for military service. The soldier with his back to us at the left of Kirchner’s painting is doubtless Hans Fehr, the instructor who organised Kirchner’s discharge from active service. Here he has invited the artist to enjoy a meal celebrating his release from the army, which is being delivered by a white-capped and aproned waitress. At the right of the composition, Kirchner himself enters through a doorway.
In earlier years Fehr, a professor at Halle’s university, had been a patron member of the art movement Die Brücke (The Bridge), organising a Die Brücke exhibition in Jena in 1911 and a solo Kirchner show there in 1914. Die Brücke was an art movement founded in Dresden in June 1905 by four students whose hearts were really set upon becoming artists, but who had enrolled in architectural practice to please their parents: Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Kirchner, who pursued architecture studies in both Munich and Dresden between 1901 and 1905, was born in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria in 1880. His initial schooling took place in Chemnitz, where his father, a chemist, had secured a position at the College of Technology. Heckel also came from Chemnitz, and his elder brother had been at school with Kirchner, which helped establish an especially close bond between the two. In Munich, Kirchner had been captivated by the art of Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn. He later recalled that: ‘There was little of interest in the [architectural] school. I learnt far more in the museums … The freedom of Rembrandt’s approach to the figure showed me the way to a reduced style of drawing.’
Die Brücke’s manifesto of 1906 declared that ‘we want to achieve freedom of life and action against the well-established older forces’. While determined to be resolutely bold and modern in their approach to art, the group also respected and drew influence from the art of the past. The meaning of their name, ‘bridge’, symbolised this fusion of old and new in their shared artistic vision. In addition to the Northern old masters, the artists were heavily influenced by the radically expressive paintings of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, as well as the new French Fauve (‘wild beast’) artists such as Henri Matisse, whose work was now being shown in Germany. Kirchner in fact considered inviting Matisse to join Die Brücke. Bold, strident colours, expressive gestural brushstrokes, abandonment of traditional perspective and provocatively simple figuration became the hallmarks of the group’s new avant-garde manner of painting and drawing, which came to be known as German Expressionism, a movement that was to be highly influential until the rise of Nazism brought its development to an end.
The Dresden art critic F. Ernst Köhler-Haussen wrote in 1907: ‘Die Brücke is an association of young and up-coming artists in the making. It is a product of ferment and unrest, a cry for barri- ers to be broken down, a trembling wish for what has hitherto lain beyond the permissible, beyond what was possible to art.’ Visiting Kirchner’s studio, Köhler-Haussen marvelled that ‘there were pictures there brighter and more daubed than anything I have seen from the most audacious French Impressionists. The body of one nude was ashimmer with green and red patches, impasto patches of paint thick as a finger.’ In the spirit of modernist rejec- tion of everything considered traditional and conservative, Die Brücke artists led experimentally open social lives, taking casual sexual partners and practising nudism both within their studios and on excursions to the German countryside. Needless to say, Kirchner’s parents were appalled by this ‘libertine’ behaviour.
In 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin. There, between 1913 and 1915, he produced an extraordinary series of street-scene paint-ings, depicting stylishly dressed sex workers and their male clients parading along the city’s boulevards. An echo of this is to be found in the two small figures in the upper left background of Officer and waitress.
Kirchner’s brief experience of military life was disastrous for both his mental and physical health. Although he enjoyed working with the horses used by his artillery regiment, he found the physical training and the crude barracks life of a soldier to be excruciating. In the upper-right background of Officer and wait- ress a row of soldiers performing the Prussian goose step march signifies the horror of that militaristic world for the artist. He was indeed fortunate that one of his instructors in riding was his old friend and patron Fehr, who recalled:
One morning a soldier appeared on the riding field who should never have been put in uniform, as one could see from a long way off. It was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner the painter. He went over to the lieutenant, clicked his heels clumsily, and reported for duty. ‘But whatever are you doing here, Herr Kirchner!’ – ‘I was called up suddenly, I shall never be a good soldier. I know that if I’m sent to the front I’ll be shot dead in an instant.’
Fehr duly came to Kirchner’s rescue, first arranging for him to take sick leave due to ‘overall debility’ and then organising to have his leave papers altered to a full military discharge. Officer and waitress, with its vivid, uplifting green and violet palette, celebrates Kirchner’s liberation from this challenging time in his young life.
Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria