To Dance Beyond Yourself: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Woodcut Prints of Mary Wigman

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s legacy as a founding member of Die Brücke (The Bridge), and one of the leading figures of German Expressionism, has made his work of the period between 1905 and 1918 the subject of considerable scholarly attention. Less often considered are the works Kirchner produced after leaving Germany for Switzerland immediately following the end of World War I. The works he made during this later period of his career are generally dismissed as stylistically deficient, derivative, and out of step with the current developments of the artistic avant-garde. Refuting this view of Kirchner’s post-Brücke work, my thesis will examine two series of Kirchner’s dance-themed woodcut prints created in the years 1926 and 1933; works inspired by acclaimed Expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. As I will show, the stylistic elements of the two images in the later series, decidedly different from the dance-themed works that he created in 1926, cannot be interpreted entirely within the context of Expressionism. I interpret these works by relating Kirchner’s interpretation of Wigman’s Ausdruckstanz (Expressionist dance) to his interest in Georges Bataille’s concept of the informe (formlessness), disseminated widely in the French Surrealist magazine Documents. My analysis of Kirchner’s dance imagery centers on the collaborative, cooperative model that Wigman modeled at her school of dance, founded in 1920. I suggest that the negotiation of the dichotomy between individuation and association that Kirchner witnessed in Wigman’s school provided a framework through which he investigated Surrealist concepts as well as his own Expressionist past. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Kirchner continued to modify his style beyond Expressionism throughout his career, and that his artistic investigations remained in dialogue with the avant-garde through the early 1930’s.