Ernst Kirchner was born in Dresden, Germany in 1880. The son of an engineer in a paper plant, Kirchner studied architecture at his father's insistence, but switched to painting as soon as he got his diploma. In 1905 he and three former fellow students set up a studio in an empty Dresden butcher shop and proclaimed themselves leaders of a new movement they called Die Brucke (The Bridge). The members endlessly read French and German philosophers, drank into the night, took midnight swims with their female models, absorbed everything in museums and galleries. In 1911, they moved to Berlin.

Kirchner had developed a style of his own; he had begun painting the famed street scenes that were to be his for...