Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

In the summer of 1937, the Nazi party opened an exhibition in Munich called Degenerate Art, mocking modern painting as sick and un-German. It included 32 works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and by the end of that year more than 600 of his paintings, prints and drawings had been pulled from German museums and either sold abroad or destroyed. Kirchner was living by then in the mountains near Davos, Switzerland, and followed the campaign against him from there. In June 1938 he shot himself outside his house.

He had spent his whole career reading Germany's nerves. In 1905, as an architecture student in Dresden, he founded Die Brücke, meaning The Bridge, with three fellow students, aiming to link academic painting to a rawer, more urgent kind of art. The group's jagged lines and acid colour became the look of German Expressionism, most famously in Kirchner's own scenes of Berlin streetwalkers and cafe crowds painted just before the First World War. He volunteered for that war in 1914, suffered a breakdown within months, and spent years moving between sanatoriums before settling permanently in Switzerland in 1917, where the Alps replaced the city as his subject.

The Berlin street paintings that got him branded degenerate two decades later, tense figures in feathered hats under gaslight, are now the core of the Brücke-Museum in Berlin, a collection assembled after his death from what survived the Nazi confiscations.