THE COVER

Sefton profiles Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a German expressionist painter and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brucke or "The Bridge". Kirchner--always markedly sensitive and by turns gregarious and antisocial--was well acquainted with the emotions that can attend illness. A breakdown experienced while serving in the military in 1915 ushered in a life of physical and mental torment. Plagued by tuberculosis and paranoia, he spent two years in sanatoriums and abused alcohol, opioids, and barbiturates. He spent his last two decades in Switzerland, where, in an attempt to calm his spirit, he turned from the Expressionist idiom to the depiction of the Swiss countryside. However, his despair over the Nazi occupation of Austria, as well as the seizure of more than 600 of his earlier works by Adolf Hitler, who branded the work of Kirchner and others as "degenerate," proved overwhelming when combined with his longstanding mental instability.