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Lot Essay
Zwei Mädchen mit Badewanne and Sitzender schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt are two spectacular studio-paintings made on one double-sided canvas by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Dresden at the height of the artist’s involvement with Die Brücke. Fusing raw, spontaneous brushwork with eloquent, simplified colour and form, both pictures are accomplished works that typify Die Brücke’s aim of capturing and conveying the energy and vitality of life directly from its source and rendering it as part of a wider, joyous and harmonious world of simplicity and grace.
In Dresden in the early years of the twentieth century it was the Brücke artists’ studios that served as both refuges from the grey, bourgeois norm of metropolitan life and society and as shared laboratories of communal experiment. By 1910, as Gustav Schiefler recalled, Kirchner’s Dresden studio had become an entire world unto itself: ‘[Kirchner] had rented a remarkable studio in a Dresden suburb, a narrow shop which had a large glass window to the street and a small adjacent space that served as a bedroom. These rooms were fantastically decorated with coloured textiles which he had made using the batik technique; with all sorts of exotic equipment and wood carvings by his own hand. 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. He worked feverishly, without noticing the time of day...’ (G. Schiefler, 1910; quoted in G. Schack, ed., Postkarten an Gustav Schiefler, Hamburg, 1976, p. 80).
From the group’s beginnings in 1905, the Brücke artists aimed to reinvigorate painting and its stale academic roots through the creation of a new art of intense and spontaneously felt experience. Towards this end, Kirchner and his comrades Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff and Max Pechstein, often worked together a group, sharing models and work spaces, in an attempt to record all the most vital and essential aspects of the human form. Central to their approach was the creation of quickly-executed and direct studies from the naked model, rendered as swiftly and as impulsively as possible. As Kirchner recalled of this exciting early period, the group produced ‘hundreds of sheets a day, interspersed with talking and play (where) the painters became models too, and vice versa… All the moments of daily life were in this way incorporated into our memory. The studio became the home of the people who were painted there: they learned from the painters, the painters learned from them. Directly and abundantly, the pictures absorbed life’ (quoted in U. Lorenz, Die Brücke, Cologne, 2008, p. 9 and p. 46).
Through the pictorial integration of the naked human form and the decorations of their studio environments, the Brücke artists sought to establish the idea of a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in which the lives of the artists, their models and their environment all collectively fused into one powerful, expressive and holistic entity. Working in partnership with his female models, Kirchner portrayed them within the bright and eclectic décor of his studio, using swift strokes of colour applied directly to canvas without any appearance of drawing or line. As in both the paintings of this double-sided canvas, he also deliberately flattened the planes of colour into a series of broad and distinct sweeps reminiscent of both recent Fauvist painting and of the wood carving techniques of African sculpture. In this way, the resultant images carry a powerful sense of the vigorous, direct and spontaneous response of the artist (both visually and emotionally) to the scenes set before him.
Similarly, the natural, languid and unselfconscious positions taken up by his models – here seen either in conversation with one another in Zwei Mädchen mit Badewanne, or seemingly engaging with the artist in Sitzender schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt – are not poses in the traditional sense. They are instead expressive of the relaxed, communal life that Kirchner encouraged in a studio where nakedness, honesty and a bohemian lifestyle free, from bourgeois habit and convention, was proudly championed. Such natural, un-staged body language was also the reason that the Brücke artists, unlike many of their contemporaries, always sought to work with untrained and unprofessional models. As Jill Lloyd has written on this point: ‘Kirchner’s break with the constraints of academic tradition… led him to seek out non-professional models, replacing studio professionals with the friends, girlfriends, child models and circus artists who shared the Brücke artists’ bohemian, anti-establishment lifestyle. As Max Pechstein recalled in 1946, “We had to find two or three people who were not professional models and therefore guaranteed us the kind of movements that avoided studio training”’ (‘Sexuality and the Nude,’ in A. Haldemann, ed., Rethinking Kirchner, Davos, 2018, p. 151).
For these reasons, as Kirchner was keen to point out, it was studio paintings like Zwei Mädchen mit Badewanne and Sitzender schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt that formed the core of the Brücke group’s collective aesthetic and practice throughout the crucial years of its development between 1909 and 1911. The path of this development, ‘from the first appliqué ceiling in the first Dresden studio to the perfectly harmonious space in each of our Berlin studios,’ Kirchner would later write, ‘is an uninterrupted logical progression, which went hand-in-hand with the painterly developments of the pictures, the graphics and the sculpture…’ (quoted in U. Lorenz, op. cit., pp. 10-11).
In Dresden in the early years of the twentieth century it was the Brücke artists’ studios that served as both refuges from the grey, bourgeois norm of metropolitan life and society and as shared laboratories of communal experiment. By 1910, as Gustav Schiefler recalled, Kirchner’s Dresden studio had become an entire world unto itself: ‘[Kirchner] had rented a remarkable studio in a Dresden suburb, a narrow shop which had a large glass window to the street and a small adjacent space that served as a bedroom. These rooms were fantastically decorated with coloured textiles which he had made using the batik technique; with all sorts of exotic equipment and wood carvings by his own hand. 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. He worked feverishly, without noticing the time of day...’ (G. Schiefler, 1910; quoted in G. Schack, ed., Postkarten an Gustav Schiefler, Hamburg, 1976, p. 80).
From the group’s beginnings in 1905, the Brücke artists aimed to reinvigorate painting and its stale academic roots through the creation of a new art of intense and spontaneously felt experience. Towards this end, Kirchner and his comrades Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff and Max Pechstein, often worked together a group, sharing models and work spaces, in an attempt to record all the most vital and essential aspects of the human form. Central to their approach was the creation of quickly-executed and direct studies from the naked model, rendered as swiftly and as impulsively as possible. As Kirchner recalled of this exciting early period, the group produced ‘hundreds of sheets a day, interspersed with talking and play (where) the painters became models too, and vice versa… All the moments of daily life were in this way incorporated into our memory. The studio became the home of the people who were painted there: they learned from the painters, the painters learned from them. Directly and abundantly, the pictures absorbed life’ (quoted in U. Lorenz, Die Brücke, Cologne, 2008, p. 9 and p. 46).
Through the pictorial integration of the naked human form and the decorations of their studio environments, the Brücke artists sought to establish the idea of a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in which the lives of the artists, their models and their environment all collectively fused into one powerful, expressive and holistic entity. Working in partnership with his female models, Kirchner portrayed them within the bright and eclectic décor of his studio, using swift strokes of colour applied directly to canvas without any appearance of drawing or line. As in both the paintings of this double-sided canvas, he also deliberately flattened the planes of colour into a series of broad and distinct sweeps reminiscent of both recent Fauvist painting and of the wood carving techniques of African sculpture. In this way, the resultant images carry a powerful sense of the vigorous, direct and spontaneous response of the artist (both visually and emotionally) to the scenes set before him.
Similarly, the natural, languid and unselfconscious positions taken up by his models – here seen either in conversation with one another in Zwei Mädchen mit Badewanne, or seemingly engaging with the artist in Sitzender schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt – are not poses in the traditional sense. They are instead expressive of the relaxed, communal life that Kirchner encouraged in a studio where nakedness, honesty and a bohemian lifestyle free, from bourgeois habit and convention, was proudly championed. Such natural, un-staged body language was also the reason that the Brücke artists, unlike many of their contemporaries, always sought to work with untrained and unprofessional models. As Jill Lloyd has written on this point: ‘Kirchner’s break with the constraints of academic tradition… led him to seek out non-professional models, replacing studio professionals with the friends, girlfriends, child models and circus artists who shared the Brücke artists’ bohemian, anti-establishment lifestyle. As Max Pechstein recalled in 1946, “We had to find two or three people who were not professional models and therefore guaranteed us the kind of movements that avoided studio training”’ (‘Sexuality and the Nude,’ in A. Haldemann, ed., Rethinking Kirchner, Davos, 2018, p. 151).
For these reasons, as Kirchner was keen to point out, it was studio paintings like Zwei Mädchen mit Badewanne and Sitzender schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt that formed the core of the Brücke group’s collective aesthetic and practice throughout the crucial years of its development between 1909 and 1911. The path of this development, ‘from the first appliqué ceiling in the first Dresden studio to the perfectly harmonious space in each of our Berlin studios,’ Kirchner would later write, ‘is an uninterrupted logical progression, which went hand-in-hand with the painterly developments of the pictures, the graphics and the sculpture…’ (quoted in U. Lorenz, op. cit., pp. 10-11).