On the 6th of May 1880, Expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany. One of the leading names in the Die Brücke movement, his art was deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and destroyed in great numbers. The artist ended his life by gunshot at the age of 58 at his house in exile in Switzerland. He was a complex, sensitive and troubled character who suffered a mental breakdown during war service, and later substance and alcohol addiction, depressive episodes, and hypochondria.
From the start of his career as an artist, Kirchner was drawn to the unconventional and the controversial: his studio became a venue in which social conventions were obliterated to allow casual love-making and frequent nudity. There were group life-drawing sessions with models from the painter’s social circle, amongst which, girls as young as 15, rather than professional models. In Kirchner’s art, there was…