Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Kirchner painted this tantalising figure, posing in a pair of black stockings, in 1909 and at the height of his involvement with the group of Dresden avant-garde artists known as 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 had written 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 naivety 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 avant-garde of Europe. 

By the time Kirchner painted Frau mit schwarzen Strümpfen (Woman with black stockings), his artistic gleanings had become more international in scope. In January of 1909, Kirchner saw an exhibition of Matisse’s Fauvist 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 influence 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 to 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. 1). 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 that June in Dresden.

In the present work, Kirchner’s use of strong contrasts of light and dark colours, reminiscent of the paintings of Edvard Munch or the artists of the Nabis, lends his picture the crisp, clearly delineated formal appearance of woodcuts. Graphic art (fig. 2) had played a significant part in the production of Die Brücke from its inception, and in the present picture, Kirchner has recreated the aesthetic of this medium. Instead of outlining the shape of the woman’s body or using a gradation of tones to indicate spatial transition, he uses contrasting colors to indicate the boundaries of form. What separates the model from her surrounding space are the strong forms of her black stockings, her skirt and her dark hair. Although the figure in this picture is not 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 who was recognisable by the dark coiffure that she wore piled on top of her head (fig. 3). Kirchner took advantage of this distinctive feature in Frau mit schwarzen Strümpfen, in which the dark hair helps to anchor the figure within the whirl of paint.

According to Donald E. Gordon, this picture was completed at the beginning of 1909 and demonstrates the stylistic characteristics that Kirchner would emphasise and develop over the following year (fig. 4). Gordon has written 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 significant 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.

Fig. 1, Kirchner and Erna Schilling in the Berlin studio, circa 1911-14

Fig. 2, Henri Matisse, Nu bleu, 1907, oil on canvas, The Baltimore Museum of Art

Fig. 3, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Liegender Frauenakt, 1911, woodcut

Fig. 4, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Sitzender Akt auf orangem Tuch (Dodo), 1909, oil on canvas, Folkwang Museum, Essen

Fig. 5, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Liegender Akt vor Spiegel, 1909-10, oil on canvas, Brücke-Museum, Berlin