Picture "Untitled (A Seated Nude and a Nude Bending Over / After Bathing)" (1924/25) (Unique piece)
Picture "Untitled (A Seated Nude and a Nude Bending Over / After Bathing)" (1924/25) (Unique piece)
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unique piece | signed | chalk drawing on handmade paper | framed | size 63 x 56 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Untitled (A Seated Nude and a Nude Bending Over / After Bathing)" (1924/25) (Unique piece)
This coloured chalk drawing on handmade paper originates from a later period of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's oeuvre. After several stays in sanatoriums, he moved to Switzerland to find strength for recovery. In 1923 he wrote in his diary: "Our new little house is a real joy to us. We shall live here comfortably and in great new order. This will really come to be a turning point of my life."
This unique piece was created on the veranda of this new house on the Wildboden plateau near Frauenkirch. The artist executed it with quick strokes in blue, brown and red. It most probably shows his wife Erna standing and Anna Müller seated, both visibly amused.
Anna was the wife of the Swiss artist Albert Müller, whom Kirchner had just met but who was to become a close friend and student. In the following years, the Müllers were frequent guests at the house near Frauenkirch and sat as models for the artist. In his 1925 diary, Kirchner described them as follows: "They are nice simple people, to whom one can be something. He studies painting and everything, and she studies housekeeping, children, etc. I started them today with the twins. The picture can become something. I start quite differently today than before, much more freely and search until I have the colour composition appropriate for the idea, then I execute first."
Coloured chalk drawing on handmade paper, 1924/25. Signed. The drawing is documented in the Kirchner Archive and will be included in the Catalogue raisonné. With an expert report by Dr Wolfgang Henze dated 2 November 2009. motif size/sheet size 41 x 33 cm. Size in frame 63 x 56 cm as shown.
Producer: ars mundi Edition Max Büchner GmbH, Bödekerstraße 13, 30161 Hanover, Germany Email: info@arsmundi.de
About Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1880-1938
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the founders of the artist‘s group "Die Brücke" (The Bridge) and one of the most important representatives of Expressionism. His oeuvre includes around 30,000 paintings, drawings, sketches and sculptures.
When a person's fear becomes too great and the purpose of life is not only threatened but also taken away, it is often only seen one way out: self-chosen death. This is what happened to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who took his own life by gunshot on a mountain pasture above Davos on 15 June 1938. Before that, however, he destroyed his woodblocks and a large number of his sculptures out of fear of the invasion of German troops.
Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany, on 6 May 1880 but moved to Switzerland on 13 October 1918. After several stays in sanatoriums because of severe depression and drug abuse in Germany, his friends admitted him to the doctor Ludwig Spengler in Davos.
The First World War, for which Kirchner volunteered for military service, triggered his anxiety. His "Self-Portrait as a Soldier" of 1915 was a testimony to his inner state of mind.
Kirchner was a painter who always reproduced his immediate surroundings in oil, woodcut, etching and also sculpture. Therefore, his work is structured through several phases. As a co-founder of the artist‘s group "Die Brücke" in 1905, he represented a strongly colourful and expressive style of painting, the themes of which are mainly the so-called "quarter-hour nudes" as well as city scenes of Dresden and Berlin. With the "discovery" of open-air painting, the nudes moved from the studio to the open air, in 1904 to the Moritzburg lakes, and from 1908 to Fehmarn.
After the ending of the group "Die Brücke" in 1913, Kirchner chose Berlin street scenes as a new motif, depicting the milieu of the cocottes with hard strokes and black outlines. For a long time, a critical view of the fringe groups of society took over from his paradisiacal landscape painting.
It was not until he returned to Switzerland that he found inner peace and equilibrium. His Swiss paintings of the 1920s are captivating for their colour harmonies and flowing forms.
In addition to painting and graphic art, the artist, who lived in an alpine hut, also devoted himself to sculpture. However, the National Socialists' seizure of power and the defamation of 639 of his works as "degenerate art" once again fuelled the fears of the sensitive artist and led him to his tragedy.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolour, drawing, lost-wax sculpture etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there are also the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a genre of modern art that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions, and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
The historical starting point is considered to be Claude Monet's "Les Meules" (1890/1891), where, for the first time, a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.