Self-Portrait As a Soldier - Kirchner

• German Nazis branded Kirchner a "degenerate artist" which forced him to resign from the Berlin Academy of Arts. Hundreds of his works were detained or destroyed by the Nazi regime. The traumatic impact of these events led to his suicide on July 15, 1938.
• At the beginning of the First World War, 1914, Kirchner volunteered for military service; however, in 1915 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged on medical grounds. He spent the next two years recovering in sanatoriums in Switzerland. In Self-Portrait as a Soldier, he depicted himself with an amputated hand despite the fact he was physically unharmed and so this image is more of an expression of how he felt
• Kirchner was one of the founding members of the Die Brücke (the Bridge)4 one of two tenets of German Expressionism, the other being the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). German Expressionism is a general term which refers to art in which the image of reality is exaggerated or distorted using line or colour to make it expressive of the artists’ feelings.
• Colour

  In German Expressionism colour in particular can be intense and non-naturalistic and saturated. Brushwork is typically free and paint application tends to be generous, sometimes impasto and highly textured.
• German Expressionism provided the visual corollary to Nietzsche’s statement. (History of Modern Art) In the manifesto of Die Brücke, 1906, Kirchner called all youth to ‘free themselves’ from the ‘established powers’. Kirchner’s primitive interests (Oceanic and African peoples) was associated with the way he and his fellow Expressionists viewed nakedness as an avant-garde subject matter.
• Nudes were considered, liberated, ‘primitive’ and sexual in an unrestrained way. For Kirchner and fellow Expressionist, Heckel, a woman’s naked body was always primal. The suggestion is that Matisse and Picasso used naked women’s bodies as artists’ props. The Expressionists suggested that woman’s naked presence was healing, as well as emblematic of sexual freedom and pleasure.
• For Heckel and Kirchner, woman became the battleground between sickness and health -- depression and vitality. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Expressionists’ fascination with the immature, unwholesome body of the adolescent Fränzi, whom both portrayed. Breastless and thin, she hardly seems a woman although she wears bright red lipstick suggesting that she is a grown one. She is an unsavoury mix of femme fatale and innocent child.
• Kirchner depicted himself with an amputated hand, which is significantly his right
• Right hand amputation


  Metaphorically emasculates him and prevents him from practising his art
• Self-Portrait (1910)


  Kirchner wearing a garish bathrobe sporting a phallic paintbrush and pipe and exuding an air of bold confidence
• Symbols in Self-Portrait (1910)

  • Garish bathrobe
  • Phallic paintbrush
  • Pipe
  • Bold confidence
• Symbols in Self-Portrait as a Soldier

  • Amputated hand
  • Nude female model
• Amputated hand in Self-Portrait as a Soldier


  Symbolic castration
• Amputation in Self-Portrait as a Soldier

  Emphasised by the presence of a nude female model whom he is now unable to paint
• Kirchner shared a studio with the Brücke (Bridge) group of artists, who cultivated a free love ethos, and maintained a Nietzschean belief in the links between virility and creative energy