Jill Lloyd – författare

Throughout his career, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner employed a highly inventive and original use of colour. He favoured novel applications of paint in unusual matte finishes. For Kirchner, colour was of primary importance, coupled with technique and style. He was one of the leading Expressionist painters of the time and was one of the founding members of the Brücke. In his deeply personal depictions, he focused on the places where he lived and worked and his close friends and associates. This book, accompanying a major exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York, provides a visual survey of Kirchner’s oeuvre and offers an in-depth analysis of different aspects of the artist’s output. Essays by leading experts examine Kirchner’s approach to colour, his interest in the decorative arts, how electric light affected his treatment of colour, the impact of Nietzsche on his work, and how he was profoundly changed by World War I. This book includes illustrations of nearly 40 paintings, 30 prints, as well as drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and decorative work.

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke first met in 1900 at the Worpswede artists’ colony—a focal point of the kind of artistic innovations that were set to transform twentieth-century European culture. Modersohn-Becker and Rilke went on to enjoy an intense friendship over a period that saw both of them having to confront personal and financial challenges as they pursued their artistic vocations. This friendship was cut short by Modersohn-Becker’s tragically early death in 1907, but it left in its wake a remarkable series of letters.As fascinating and evocative when discussing the nature of married life and the difficulty of furnishing one’s home as they are when exploring the expressive possibilities of art and poetry, the letters exchanged by Modersohn-Becker and Rilke are a testament to both correspondents’ exceptional descriptive gifts and penetrating social intelligence.Brought together in English for the first time here and introduced by an illuminating essay by the art historian Jill Lloyd, The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence provides a fascinating view of everyday life during an exceptionally fertile and exciting period of cultural production.