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Lot Essay
This work is listed in the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archives, Wichtrach/Bern.
One of a sequence of dynamic, self-contained colour drawings intended to stand as completed compositional studies or even finished works in their own right, Zwei liegende Akte is a stunning drawing executed by Kirchner in his Dresden studio some time around 1908. Depicting two women, one naked, the other clothed, and each reclining on a sofa in the midst of the artist’s elaborately decorated studio, this drawing is one of a sequence of works portraying the predominant theme of Kirchner’s art of these years, the highly corporeal interaction between two female figures in an interior.
Closely related, in this respect, to the very similarly coloured drawing Zwei Mädchen auf einem Diwan of 1908-9 now in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Zwei liegende Akte is a swiftly executed response to the colourful dynamism of the impromptu scene that took place naturally, uncoordinated and unposed before the artist. Kirchner’s aim with such works was to spontaneously record not a visual impression of what he saw, but rather to express, through an immediacy of response, something of the emotional impact and feeling that the women, acting and reacting naturally to one another prompted in him as they moved and/or sat around in the carefully constructed, faux-primitive idyll of his exotically decorated studio.
Towards this end, Kirchner’s studio, set up in a shop in a bourgeois district of Dresden, was, as Gustav Schiefler recalled of a visit there in 1910, ‘fantastically decorated with coloured textiles which he had made using the batik technique’, an arena within which to, live, work and entertain. It was a ‘primitive setting, born of necessity but nevertheless strongly marked by his own taste’, a haven and an idyll where Kirchner could live ‘a disorderly lifestyle... according to bourgeois standards, simple in material terms, but highly ambitious in his artistic sensitivity’ (G. Schiefler, quoted in G. Schack (ed.), Postkarten an Gustav Schiefler. Hamburg, 1976, p. 80).
Here, in this work, Kirchner’s fluid and spontaneous line of alternating, often directly contrasting colour almost miraculously articulates the full volume, poise and bodily expression of his two female sitters. While the dress of the woman on the left has been rendered with swift energetic sweeps of yellow and two squiggled blue lines, the soft, fully rounded form of her nude companion asserts itself almost in negative. Kirchner has left the gentle tone of the coloured paper on which he chose to draw this work, to powerfully establish a sense of the softness of her flesh while a combination of only a few differently coloured lines and an articulation of the dense colourful forms around her is enough to render the full roundness of the body. The resultant work as a whole is not just a testament to the inventiveness and extraordinary mastery of Kirchner’s spontaneous and immediate manner of drawing, but also to the vigour and energy of his vision.
One of a sequence of dynamic, self-contained colour drawings intended to stand as completed compositional studies or even finished works in their own right, Zwei liegende Akte is a stunning drawing executed by Kirchner in his Dresden studio some time around 1908. Depicting two women, one naked, the other clothed, and each reclining on a sofa in the midst of the artist’s elaborately decorated studio, this drawing is one of a sequence of works portraying the predominant theme of Kirchner’s art of these years, the highly corporeal interaction between two female figures in an interior.
Closely related, in this respect, to the very similarly coloured drawing Zwei Mädchen auf einem Diwan of 1908-9 now in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Zwei liegende Akte is a swiftly executed response to the colourful dynamism of the impromptu scene that took place naturally, uncoordinated and unposed before the artist. Kirchner’s aim with such works was to spontaneously record not a visual impression of what he saw, but rather to express, through an immediacy of response, something of the emotional impact and feeling that the women, acting and reacting naturally to one another prompted in him as they moved and/or sat around in the carefully constructed, faux-primitive idyll of his exotically decorated studio.
Towards this end, Kirchner’s studio, set up in a shop in a bourgeois district of Dresden, was, as Gustav Schiefler recalled of a visit there in 1910, ‘fantastically decorated with coloured textiles which he had made using the batik technique’, an arena within which to, live, work and entertain. It was a ‘primitive setting, born of necessity but nevertheless strongly marked by his own taste’, a haven and an idyll where Kirchner could live ‘a disorderly lifestyle... according to bourgeois standards, simple in material terms, but highly ambitious in his artistic sensitivity’ (G. Schiefler, quoted in G. Schack (ed.), Postkarten an Gustav Schiefler. Hamburg, 1976, p. 80).
Here, in this work, Kirchner’s fluid and spontaneous line of alternating, often directly contrasting colour almost miraculously articulates the full volume, poise and bodily expression of his two female sitters. While the dress of the woman on the left has been rendered with swift energetic sweeps of yellow and two squiggled blue lines, the soft, fully rounded form of her nude companion asserts itself almost in negative. Kirchner has left the gentle tone of the coloured paper on which he chose to draw this work, to powerfully establish a sense of the softness of her flesh while a combination of only a few differently coloured lines and an articulation of the dense colourful forms around her is enough to render the full roundness of the body. The resultant work as a whole is not just a testament to the inventiveness and extraordinary mastery of Kirchner’s spontaneous and immediate manner of drawing, but also to the vigour and energy of his vision.