Crimson & Cobalt & Magenta

Crimson is the Kirchner figure — the deep vivid crimson of the human figures in the most important Ernst Ludwig Kirchner paintings. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: the most important single artist of the die Brücke group — and arguably the most important German Expressionist painter — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (May 6, 1880, Aschaffenburg – June 15, 1938, Frauenkirch bei Davos — at age 58) created the most internationally celebrated body of work of any die Brücke artist: the Berlin Street Scenes series (1913-1915 — the most important and most internationally recognized body of Kirchner's work — depicting the streets, cafes, and public spaces of pre-WW1 Berlin with the most drastically distorted colors, the most elongated and most psychologically disturbing figures, and the most immediately expressionist emotional intensity — the specific series includes: 'Street, Berlin' — Strasse, Berlin — 1913 — Museum of Modern Art, New York; 'Potsdamer Platz' — 1914 — Nationalgalerie Berlin; and 'Five Women in the Street' — Fünf Frauen auf der Straße — 1913 — Museum Ludwig, Cologne). The Kirchner crimson: in the Berlin Street Scenes, the most prominent human figures (particularly the female figures — the 'kokotten' — the female urban type at the intersection of fashion, commerce, and sexuality that most fascinated Kirchner) are depicted in the most dramatically vivid and most harshly distorted crimson-to-scarlet — using the most aggressively saturated and most directionally unmodeled flat color in direct opposition to the most conventional naturalistic color representation. Cobalt is the Expressionist background — the medium vivid cobalt of the die Brücke street and interior backgrounds. Die Brücke color theory: the die Brücke artists rejected the most fundamental conventions of academic painting (including the most carefully modeled naturalistic colors, the most conventionally organized spatial perspective, and the most traditionally academic figuration) in favor of the most radically direct and the most emotionally unmediated use of color. The cobalt background: in the Berlin Street Scenes specifically, Kirchner uses a characteristic medium vivid cobalt blue for the street surfaces, the building facades, and the night-sky backgrounds — producing the most harshly dissonant and most emotionally unsettling combination of the vivid cobalt against the crimson figures — the specific color relationship that creates the most immediately disturbing and most psychologically charged of the Expressionist street-scene compositions. Magenta is the die Brücke distortion — the pure vivid electric magenta of the most dramatically distorted Expressionist color. The Expressionist palette rationale: the die Brücke artists — and Kirchner most specifically — used the most extreme and most emotionally disturbing color combinations deliberately, as the most direct expression of psychological and emotional states that could not be represented through the most naturalistic color conventions. The magenta: pure vivid magenta (approximately CSS #FF00FF — a color that does not exist in the natural visible spectrum — it is a 'non-spectral' color produced by the brain combining the most extreme ends of the visible spectrum — red and violet — without the intermediate spectral colors) was the most radically 'unnatural' and most psychologically disturbing color available in the late-19th and early-20th century synthetic pigment palette — introduced to European painting by the discovery of the first aniline dye — magenta — fuchsine — in 1859 (the same year as the Battle of Magenta in northern Italy, after which the dye was named). The die Brücke use of magenta: Kirchner, Heckel, and Schmidt-Rottluff used pure vivid magenta-to-cerise as the most immediately shocking and most psychologically challenging color accent — appearing in the most emotionally charged elements of the most disturbing compositions — the skin tones of the most distorted figures, the most unsettlingly lit backgrounds, and the most aggressively anti-naturalistic color passages.