Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Artist
Robert Priseman
(British, born 1965)
Date2013
Mediumoil on wood
Dimensions7 7/8 × 5 3/4 × 1/2 in. (20 × 14.6 × 1.3 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineGift of the artist, 2014
Object numberUAC6237
DescriptionIn an essay accompanying his 2014 exhibit Fame, British artist Robert Priseman quotes rock star Jarvis Cocker as saying, “I think basically becoming famous has taken the place of going to heaven in modern society.” Fame, a series of one hundred small portraits in oil and acrylic paint, includes images of renowned artists, writers, musicians, and other well-known personages — from Billie Holliday and Ernest Hemingway to Amy Winehouse and Hervé Villechaize, among others — all of whom died by suicide or self-destructive behavior. The portraits are painted onto old religious icons — small planks of wood inscribed with devotional images of saints and other holy figures — purchased on eBay by Priseman and used, as British priest and essayist Martin Boland notes, as “sacred readymades.” Celebrities, Priseman suggests, have become the venerated saints and martyrs of the modern age, though with a difference: “Celebrities would not reveal God’s purposes to us,” says Fr. Boland, “they would reveal our own.” Priseman has often addressed difficult subjects via portraiture, inviting viewers to engage face-to-face with everyone from circus “freaks” and condemned prisoners, to school shooter Dylan Klebold, and the operators of Nazi death camps.It’s fitting that the icon representing the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner should come to reside in Detroit; Wilhelm Valentiner, the first director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, championed the work of the Expressionists, and Kirchner’s first American retrospective was held at the DIA in 1937. The painter survived a mental breakdown following his military service in World War I, only to see his work condemned twenty years later as “degenerate” by the Nazis. Despondent, and dreading yet another war, he took his own life in 1938. Priseman’s portrait of Kirchner is painted over an image of Jesus as the “Salvator Mundi” — the “savior of the world,” who rests one hand upon a globe and raises the other in blessing. It’s perhaps an appropriate pairing, as Kirchner and his fellow Expressionists yearned for a more spiritual world, free of the alienating forces of modernity.
Born in Derbyshire, UK in 1965, Robert Priseman is a renowned collector, curator, writer, and lecturer on contemporary art, as well as a painter whose works are exhibited widely and held in a number of museum collections. In 2013, he co-founded Contemporary British Painting, an artist-run organization that promotes the latest in art from the UK.
Text by Sean Bieri
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