You could be forgiven for drawing a connection between Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s shocking color palette and his character. It would be understandable enough, considering his problems with morphine, Veronal and absinthe; the nervous breakdown precipitated by his artillery training in World War I, and his many long hospital stays afterward; his bohemian relations with women and girls; his falling-out with the three other members of Die Brücke, the Dresden club that was a driving force, alongside Munich’s Der Blaue Reiter, in originating German Expressionism; the dates he altered on some paintings, to make himself seem even more innovative than he already was; his wavering ambivalence about National Socialism; and his suicide in 1938, at the age of 58, after the Nazis had denounced him and most other modern artists as “degenerates.”

But to linger on Kirchner’s lurid biography would be unfair to the mesmerizing technical genius of his style, amply on display in “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,” the Neue Galerie’s generous and essential overview of a peripatetic and unconventional career. Surrounding more or less sober portrait subjects with backgrounds of flat but brilliant color, as Kirchner did, wasn’t just a youthful revolt against the staid academic painting of the late 19th century, or a bid to put German visual culture on the map. (Of course, it did those, too.) It was also an ingenious way to articulate subjective experience in an increasingly materialist modern world.

At first, Kirchner worked to capture mood and life force by turning real colors up to unreal volumes. The subject of his “Portrait of Hans Frisch,” from around 1907, sprawls across a patterned sofa in a tightly buttoned indigo suit. Think of the first icy trickle of water in a riotous springtime brook. Everything is rendered with the same impatient dashes, but while Frisch himself is an orderly chorus of lighter or darker blues, the sofa beneath him is a cacophony of olives, scarlets and pale, bilious yellows. Thoughtfully covering his mouth with one hand, Frisch seems touched by this chaos only in one motley shadowed cheek.

Image Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Two Nudes,” from 1907. Credit... National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Because he’s the only real content of the picture, though, you can’t read the noise or color as pertaining to anything but him. Maybe it represents an emotional turmoil Frisch is spending no small effort to contain. Maybe it’s that same turmoil coloring his own vision of the world around him. Either way, Kirchner powerfully dramatizes the lonely gulf between what we feel and what we can see.