Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Lise Gujer, Davos
Dr Hanny Caplazi, Derendingen, Switzerland (acquired by 1940)
Sale: Kornfeld & Klipstein, Bern, 10th June 1966, lot 443
Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York (purchased at the above sale)
Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above)
Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above in 1988)
Acquired by the present owner in 2005

New York, Leonard Hutton Galleries, Fauves and Expressionists, 1968, no. 48, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
New York, Leonard Hutton Galleries, Jawlensky & Major German Expressionists, 1980-81, no. 33, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Donald E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968, no. 80, illustrated p. 277

According to the Leonard Hutton Galleries label on the stretcher, this work is titled 'Die schwarze Grete' on the reverse of the board, which is now covered by the canvas lining. Condition: Executed on board which has been laid down on canvas. Apart from one spot of retouching, approximately 2 by 2cm. towards the bottom of the left edge, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although overall the colours are slightly deeper in the original. The blue is less purple and the greens are stronger in the original.
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Kirchner painted this tantalising figure posing in a pair of black stockings in 1909, at the height of his involvement with Die Brücke. The picture exemplifies the zest and vigour that characterised this important artistic movement and the ambitions of the young artist who was its founder and author of its governing philosophy. ‘With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth,’ Kirchner wrote in the programme of Die Brücke in 1906. ‘As youth, we carry the future and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement against the long established older forces. Everyone who reproduces that which drives him to creation with directness and authenticity belongs to us’ (quoted in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (ed.), Art in Theory, 1900-1990, Oxford & Cambridge, 1993, pp. 67-68). What Kirchner and his colleagues, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, were promoting was a freedom of expression and a rejection of the traditions of painting that they had encountered as art students in Dresden in the early 1900s. Although the style of their art was rooted in German folk art and influenced by the perspectival advancements of French Post-Impressionist painting, the members of Die Brücke invested their art with a freshness and naïvety that expressed the self-confidence of youth. Theirs was the first distinctly German artistic movement of the twentieth century, and their bold aesthetic established Kirchner and his colleagues as a reckonable force among the European avant-garde. 

 

By the time Kirchner painted Frau mit schwarzen Strümpfen, his artistic gleanings had become more international in scope. In January 1909 he saw an exhibition of Matisse’s Fauve compositions at the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin. He was so impressed with the wild colouration of these pictures that he tried to recruit Matisse to join Die Brücke. Nothing ever came of this offer, but the effect that Matisse’s art had on the members of Die Brücke was profound. Working with Heckel in Dresden, Kirchner executed a series of paintings of female figures that emphasised the strength and formal importance of colour. Both Kirchner’s and Heckel’s pictures from this time demonstrate an exuberant application of paint and their preference for unmitigated pigments and broad, sweeping brushstrokes, clearly indebted to Matisse (fig. 2). Their use of blacks and emphasis on figuration took the Fauve’s aesthetic to a new level, which was praised by critics when the two artists exhibited their new paintings at Emil Richter’s gallery in Dresden that June.

 

In the present work, Kirchner’s use of strong colour contrasts lends it the crisp appearance of woodcuts. Graphic art (fig. 3) played a significant part in the production of Die Brücke, an aesthetic evidenced by the present composition. Instead of outlining the shape of the woman’s body or using a gradation of tones to indicate spatial transition, he uses contrasting colours to indicate the boundaries of form. What separates the model from her surrounding space are the strong forms of her black stockings, skirt and dark hair. Although the subject of this picture has not been identified, most of the female figures that appear in Kircher’s paintings of 1909 were modeled after his companion Doris ‘Dodo’ Grosse, a Dresden milliner recognisable by the dark coiffure that she wore piled on top of her head (fig. 4). 
 

According to Donald E. Gordon, this painting was completed at the beginning of 1909 and demonstrates the stylistic characteristics that Kirchner would emphasise and develop over the following year (fig. 5). Gordon wrote that these pictures from early 1909 ‘show emergent approaches to both line and place of considerable significance.  Losing its earlier shape-defining qualities, line now functions as color accent. It is increasingly discontinuous, although often multiplied in several colors, and serves to heighten curvilinear rhythms established by the dominant shapes. The favored spatial device continues to be a strongly foreshortened ground plane, with the major accessory objects placed in bold diagonals. […] Since few vestiges of the Munch-inspired frontality of figures remain, the spatial depth of the early 1909 picture would appear quite great were it not for the advancing qualities of the pure color chosen for the background areas, which relate them to those of the foreground figures. In most of these compositions, the major human protagonists are placed well off-center, allowing coloristic interplay between foreground and background’ (D. E. Gordon, op. cit., pp. 63-64).

 

The first owner of this work was Lise Gujer, the Swiss weaver responsible for executing the many tapestries that Kirchner designed in the 1930s. Gujer’s possession of this painting is perhaps indicative of the artist’s own appreciation of it. He entrusted Gujer to understand and translate his artistic accomplishments, and here he has given her an example of the best of his aesthetic.