Art & Creativity Quote by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Kirchner is staking a claim for painting as an act of invention, not documentation, and he does it with the calm authority of someone who’s watched “objective correctness” become a cudgel. The line draws a sharp border between the camera’s alibi and the painter’s responsibility: to remake the world in the image of felt experience. “Appearance” here isn’t a shallow surface; it’s a charged skin where anxiety, desire, speed, and alienation show up as color, angle, and distortion. When he says the painter “creates new appearances,” he’s arguing that perception itself is plastic, and the canvas is where that plasticity becomes visible.

The subtext is defensive and insurgent at once. In the early 20th century, after photography and academic naturalism had already claimed the territory of accuracy, Expressionists like Kirchner (a core figure in Die Brucke) needed a different mandate. Their Berlin streets and bodies are famously stretched, jagged, oversaturated: not because they couldn’t “get it right,” but because “right” was the wrong question. The world after industrial acceleration and before catastrophe didn’t feel stable, so why should it look stable?

There’s also an ethical edge: “objective correctness” implies a single, sanctioned viewpoint. Kirchner rejects that monopoly. He suggests the painter’s task is to make competing truths legible - to show how modern life appears when it hits the nervous system. In that sense, the quote is less a theory of art than a refusal to let reality be defined by measurement alone.