‘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.’
Painted at the beginning of Kirchner’s career and the height of his involvement with the Brücke movement, Selbstbildnis mit Pfeife is the artist’s first self-portrait and a profoundly important painting. It marks the beginning of a body of work that would prove deeply significant for the artist. Around twenty-five oils bear the artist’s likeness, both his figure alone and as part of a couple or a larger group; of these paintings nearly two thirds are held in museum collections (see below). As an embodiment of youthful confidence, Selbstbildnis mit Pfeife offers an unparalleled insight into Kirchner’s artistic vision and highlights his role as a leading figure among a generation of artists who would increasingly come to see themselves and their life experiences as core subject matter for their art.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Self-Portraits
The year before he painted this powerful self-portrait, Kirchner wrote in the programme of Die Brücke: ‘With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth. 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 (eds.), 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.
Right: Fig. 2, Henri Matisse, André Derain, 1905, oil on canvas, Tate Modern, London © Succession H. Matisse / DACS 2022
This energy and optimism for a new future in art is encapsulated in Selbstbildnis mit Pfeife. The emphatic application of paint in clearly defined brushstrokes of vibrant colour is particularly expressive. Donald E. Gordon discussed the present work in his catalogue raisonné for the artist, describing how, ‘intense blue is used for the hair and brows and pure scarlet to outline the eyes, so that the green and orange upper and lower fields of the face appear to possess an arbitrariness of colour not unlike French fauve works [figs. 1 & 2]. This parallel indicates not Kirchner’s debt to the fauves (whose work he only discovered a year or two later), but the fact that both he and the fauves drew similar conclusions concerning arbitrary colour from earlier Van Gogh and neo-impressionist paintings’ (D. E. Gordon, op. cit., p. 52).
Right: Fig. 4, Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Pipe, 1887, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The influence of Van Gogh was indeed profound, and not just through his technical and aesthetic innovations. For Kirchner and a whole generation of German and Austrian artists who were pioneering a newly expressive concept of painting and grappling with questions of identity and legacy from the very outset of their careers, Van Gogh would prove exemplary. This connection was celebrated in the major exhibition Vincent Van Gogh and Expressionism held jointly by the Van Gogh Museum and the Neue Galerie, New York in 2007, in which this work was included. Indeed, as Kirchner's first self-portrait, Selbstbildnis mit Pfeife, reveals the extent of an influence that was as much spiritual as it was stylistic; as Alexander Eiling and Felix Krämer note: ‘van Gogh’s numerous self-portraits [figs. 3 & 4] prompted many German artists to depict themselves in similar manner. Their different modes of painting testify to the fact that it was often not so much the Dutch artist’s style as his personality that served them as role model’ (quoted in Making Van Gogh, A German Love Story (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., n.p.). Kirchner would have seen Van Gogh's work first-hand at the 1905 Galerie Ernst Arnold exhibition in Dresden. Among the works shown there, were two self-portraits including Self-portrait with Pipe (fig. 4) which has an obvious connection to the present work. Seen in this context, Selbstbildnis mit Pfeife reads as a declaration of intent from the young artist and painting designed to align Kirchner with the other European masters of his age.
As Felix Krämer writes: ‘Despite the fact that Kirchner’s self-portraits make up only a relatively small group within the context of his oeuvre as a whole, these paradigmatic pictures are of central importance for the perception of Kirchner and the construction of his legend as a modern artist—a legend that persists to the present day. Kirchner encounters himself in his self-portraits, and in turn he exposes this self for others to see [...]. Supposedly blunt and unsparing, the artist reveals himself to a public that is particularly tempted to reconstruct a biographical interrelationship where self-portraits are concerned. It is nevertheless the artist himself who decides what information he wishes to communicate with his pictures. With his self-portraits, Kirchner places himself in a tradition that was lastingly influenced by such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Vincent van Gogh [fig. 5]. And it is not coincidental that Kirchner was seen as closely associated with the latter artist, who was then regarded as the epitome of the artistic genius misjudged and misunderstood by society’ (Felix Krämer, ‘Viewing Kirchner’, in ibid., p. 34).
Right: Fig. 7, Egon Schiele, Selbstbildnis mit Lampionfrüchten, 1912, oil on canvas, Leopold Museum, Vienna
The self-portrait as a statement of artistic expression has a long history. Whether embedded in large-scale, multi-figure scenes, as so many Renaissance artists tended towards or in depictions of direct conflict with the artist’s own ego, a cornerstone of more confrontational modern artists such as Schiele and Munch (figs. 6 & 7), self-portraits are a continual vehicle for examination and change. Artists working today have taken this confrontation one step further. Rudolf Stingel, for example, started, in 2005, to paint self-portraits based on photographic portraits of himself taken by Sam Samore. Some years later he revised this method using photographic self-portraits Kirchner had taken of himself to create detailed grisaille canvases of these images (see figs. 8 & 9). Kirchner was an avid photographer throughout most of his artistic career, often capturing himself, his lovers and friends on film. His was not an unexamined life. In Selbstbildnis mit Pfeife, we find the artist at the outset of his career, full of excitement and optimism. Surrounded by like-minded friends and supported by key patrons he was, for the first time, able to explore his vision for twentieth century art and lay the foundations for his work of the years to come.
Right: Fig. 9, Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner), 2011, oil on linen copyright Rudolf Stingel
The first owner of this painting was Kirchner’s contemporary and co-founder of Die Brücke, the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. It was subsequently acquired by the important patron and collector Hugo Simon (fig. 10). Simon assembled an extremely important art collection which spanned from French classicism, including an important canvas by Poussin, through nineteenth-century painting, with highlights by Courbet and Caspar David Friedrich, to major examples of German & Austrian Expressionism. He was a friend and benefactor to many artists, as well as being a member of the acquisitions committee of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and a board member of several art societies.
Simon and his wife Gertrude fled Berlin in 1933, travelling first to join their children near Nice and then on to the island of Mallorca. The couple finally settled in Paris where Simon re-established his bank and was active in helping to organise the resistance movement. They left Paris shortly before the German occupation in 1940 and went south again via Montauban to Marseille and onwards to Portugal before emigrating to Rio de Janiero in 1941.
Selbstbildnis mit Pfeife was exhibited at the major Kirchner retrospective in Zurich in 1952 and subsequently at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. During this period the work also appeared in a number of publications including Peter Selz's landmark survey German Expressionist Painting.
It was then acquired by the Texan heiress and philanthropist Anne Burnett Tandy. A major collector of Modern Art, Anne Burnett Tandy was also an important patron, acting as trustee for a number of leading American institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her personal collection encompassed works by Picasso, Mondrian, Miró and Matisse, many of which were donated to museums in her lifetime or after her death. This work remained in her collection and was sold as part of her estate in 1981. It was acquired there by the family of the current owners and is being offered for sale for the first time in over forty years.