.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In September 1905 Kirchner moved to a new studio in a former butcher's shop in a working class district of Dresden, a space that became the focal point for the Brücke group's bohemian lifestyle. Kirchner filled his studio with textiles, batik hangings, sculptures and paintings, many of them inspired by the artist's encounters with tribal art in Dresden's museums and libraries. Gustav Schiefler was later to describe Kirchner's studio in 1910 as 'a primitive setting, born of necessity but nevertheless strongly marked by his own taste. He lived a disorderly lifestyle here according to bourgeois standards, simple in material terms, but highly ambitious in his artistic sensitivity' (quoted in exh. cat., Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, London, 2003, p. 17).
Executed circa 1909, Liebesszene I belongs to a small series of erotic reliefs in terracotta, some of which, along with other early works in the same medium, are now believed to be lost or destroyed. Terracotta was an unusual medium for Kirchner; aside from these works in terracotta and other reliefs and figures executed in stone and metal, Kirchner's sculptural oeuvre is almost exclusively carved in wood. In its blatantly erotic subject matter and simplistic stylisation of the figures, the present work displays the influence of carved wooden beams from the Palau Islands in Micronesia that Kirchner had seen in the Ethnographic Museum in Dresden, while the medium of the relief itself may have been at least partly inspired by the doorway decorations from the Indian cave temples at Ajanta which Kirchner discovered illustrated in Dresden's central library. The subject matter of Liebesszene I also mirrors the louche, bohemian lifestyle and lax attitudes towards sex and nudity that characterised Kirchner's own surroundings. This atmosphere, depicted in numerous drawings and sketches, was present everywhere in the studio itself, from the roundels of couples making love on the curtains between the two rooms, to the wall hangings in his bedroom, reflecting the Brücke and Jugendstil ideal of art, lifestyle and decoration harmonising in a single creative unity.
Executed circa 1909, Liebesszene I belongs to a small series of erotic reliefs in terracotta, some of which, along with other early works in the same medium, are now believed to be lost or destroyed. Terracotta was an unusual medium for Kirchner; aside from these works in terracotta and other reliefs and figures executed in stone and metal, Kirchner's sculptural oeuvre is almost exclusively carved in wood. In its blatantly erotic subject matter and simplistic stylisation of the figures, the present work displays the influence of carved wooden beams from the Palau Islands in Micronesia that Kirchner had seen in the Ethnographic Museum in Dresden, while the medium of the relief itself may have been at least partly inspired by the doorway decorations from the Indian cave temples at Ajanta which Kirchner discovered illustrated in Dresden's central library. The subject matter of Liebesszene I also mirrors the louche, bohemian lifestyle and lax attitudes towards sex and nudity that characterised Kirchner's own surroundings. This atmosphere, depicted in numerous drawings and sketches, was present everywhere in the studio itself, from the roundels of couples making love on the curtains between the two rooms, to the wall hangings in his bedroom, reflecting the Brücke and Jugendstil ideal of art, lifestyle and decoration harmonising in a single creative unity.