Lot 54
  • 54

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Estimate
1,600,000 - 2,000,000 GBP
bidding is closed

Description

  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
  • Stilleben mit Lampe (Still-life with Lamp)
  • signed E L Kirchner and titled on the reverse
  • oil on canvas
  • 95 by 95cm.
  • 37 3/8 by 37 3/8 in.

Provenance

Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Munich

Paul Poiret, France

Private Collection, France (granddaughter of the above, acquired by descent. Sold: Yves Rabourdin & Olivier Choppin de Janvry, Paris, 17th February 1999)

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

 

Exhibited

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza & Fundación Caja Madrid, Brücke - El Nacimiento del Expresionismo Alemán, 2005, no. 137, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from 1912)

Berlin, Brücke-Museum, Brücke - Die Geburt des deutschen Expressionismus, 2005-06, no. 143, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from 1912)

Literature

Umelecky Mesicnik, Prague, 1912-13, vol. II, illustration of a photograph of this painting (the photograph was signed by the artist)

Letter from Kirchner to Vincenc Kramár, 28th April 1913

Kubismus in Prag 1909-1925 (exhibition catalogue), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1991, illustration of a photograph of this painting p. 73 (the photograph was signed by the artist)

Condition

The canvas is unlined and the edges have been strip-lined. There is a spot of retouching in the white pigment just left of centre, visible under ultra-violet light. There appear to be other areas of old retouching which do not fluoresce under ultra-violet light. Apart from some craquelure throughout and some associated small flecks of paint loss, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the brown and yellow tones are slightly softer in the original.
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Catalogue Note

The present work is a powerful and rich still-life from the height of Kirchner’s Expressionist style, featuring an oil lamp, a distinctive pink coffee cup and other objects that populate his paintings from this period. Captured with dynamic brushstrokes of green, pink, ochre and yellow tones, the arrangement of motifs in the foreground is counter-balanced by the two figures beneath what appears to be a palm tree in the background.

 

The scene depicts Kirchner’s Dresden studio at Berlinerstrasse 80, a small space to which he moved in November 1909 and which he occupied until his move to Berlin in October 1911. Several photographs taken by Kirchner document the lively interior of the studio, transformed by painted curtains, wall paintings and wood carvings (fig. 3). The overall vibrant atmosphere, with the reference to the artist's own painting of nudes visible as part of the studio, is strongly reminiscent of Matisse's Nature morte à 'La Danse' (fig. 2). In December 1910, the collector and scholar Gustav Schiefler visited Kirchner in Dresden and subsequently commented about his studio: ‘The 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’ (quoted in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2003, p. 17).

 

Whilst Kirchner was ineluctably drawn to the dynamic city life, he felt a need to counteract his life in Dresden, and later Berlin, with visits to the country. The theme of the nude moving freely and uninhibited within a landscape was a key theme in the work of Kirchner and his fellow Die Brücke artists. During this time, Kirchner often joined artists including Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff on painting trips in the country, such as the Baltic island of Fehmarn and the Moritzburger See. The artists would spend several weeks with their female companions and models, bathing and playing nude and living in tents or huts. It was this experience of Freikörperkultur, coupled with tribal art that Kirchner encountered in Dresden museums, that inspired his paintings of nude bathers and erotic scenes that covered the walls of his studio, and two such figures appear in the background of the present composition.

 

Jill Lloyd wrote about the artist’s Dresden studio: ‘Numerous paintings, drawings and prints depict the bohemian space of Kirchner’s studio, which is also recorded in a series of brilliantly evocative photographs taken by the artist. The studio appears in Kirchner’s paintings and works on paper as a setting for the nude, the portrait, and the scenes of bohemian revelry that characterise the heyday of his association with the young Brücke artists in Dresden. The enterprise of the studio, where art, lifestyle and decoration were drawn into a single creative unity, initially echoed the Jugendstil ideal of bringing art and life into harmony, an aspiration which Kirchner and the Expressionist generation infused with new vitality. By covering his dingy studio with exotic decorations, piercing its confines with a mirror or doorway, or pinning a freshly painted canvas to its grey walls, Kirchner did more than imaginatively expand the physical limits of the place. As time progressed, the works of art which reappear in his studio compositions as pictures within pictures enabled Kirchner to transcend the mundane reality of the room to reveal a symbolic or metaphysical realm where the relationship between art and life could be called into question’ (J. Lloyd in ibid., p. 15).

 

Kirchner was at this time at the height of his experimentation with the Expressionist tendency towards a distortion of form and perspective and a stridency of colour and vision. The powerful frontality and dizzying perspective of the present composition, with its picture plane tilted up towards the viewer, echo the boldness and assurance of vision that Kirchner possessed at this time, a joyous and generous confidence in life and nature. By distorting the perspective and combining genres, he transcends the laws of perception and creates a more symbolic concept of space. Despite Kirchner’s title, Stilleben mit Lampe, which focuses on the human artefacts that dominate the foreground, the painting appears to lavish its core energies on the harmony of the couple in the background and their unity with nature: a paradigm for living that Kirchner and his fellow Die Brücke artists embraced wholeheartedly in the years immediately preceding the First World War.