‘To stand and see within’: expressionist space in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Rhine Bridge at Cologne

Abstract

This essay examines Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Rhine Bridge at Cologne, one in a series of cityscapes that Kirchner painted during 1914–15, all of which treat monuments and spaces that had become important symbols within the German imagination. The painting's relationship to a discourse about a ‘modern Gothic’ style, as manifested in the 1912 Sonderbund chapel and a regional expressionist movement, are discussed. This relationship is shown to involve a broader concern about the ‘problem of individuation’ in modern life that was addressed in the theoretical writings of Wilhelm Worringer, Martin Buber and Georg Simmel. Kirchner's painting gave spatial form to this problem through the juxtaposition of modern steel bridge and Gothic cathedral and the empathic projection of the viewer into a space within which individual expression intersected with public discourse.