ABSTRACT
The point that makes E. L. Kirchner's art so difficult for a contemporary sensibility to grasp is that it uses the conventions of modernist pictorial form as a means rather than as an end in itself. His interest in the primitive sculpture of Africa did not inspire—as it did in Paris—any radical departures in pictorial syntax, but rather another way of defining his own existential aspirations. Kirchner himself could not sustain so difficult an artistic task for the whole of his career. Indeed, very few of the Expressionists could. Art, for Kirchner, was conceived as a criticism of life, and life itself conceived as an enterprise that would not permit art either an easy or an autonomous role. Professor Gordon is so anxious to legitimize Kirchner in formal pictorial terms that he manages to overlook the real strengths of this interesting artist—strengths that have little to do with disquisitions on "the absolute primacy of the picture plane”.
