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Artist or Maker: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

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Provenance: The artist's estate.
Alfred Otten, Monchengladbach, 1961.
Marianne Otten, Monchengladbach, by descent from the above.
Private collection, America.

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Exhibited: Dresden, Kunstsalon E. Richter, Die Brücke, September 1908.
Frankfurt, Galerie Ludwig Schames, Kirchner, February - March 1919, no. 44 (verso).
London, Marlborough Fine Art, July 1962, no. 27.
London, Tate Gallery, Painters of the 'Brücke', October - December 1964, no. 57 (illustrated),

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Literature: The artist's photo archive, vol. I, no. 101 (dated 1906).
D.E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968, p. 54, nos. 39, 39v (recto illustrated p. 271 and again in colour pl. 4).

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE AMERICAN COLLECTOR

Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid (Woman in a white dress) is one of Kirchner's finest and best-known early paintings. An accomplished work in which Kirchner displays the mastery he had recently gained over a wide variety of contemporary styles and influences, it marks the highpoint of the Brücke group's early development and its transition to the forefront of the international avant-garde.

Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid marks a distinct development from much of Kirchner's earlier work and when first exhibited at the Brücke group's annual exhibition at the Emil Richter Gallery in Dresden in September 1908 it was immediately singled out by critics as the group's boldest and most important pictorial statement to date. It is arguably the finest full impasto painting that the artist executed during his illustrious career. Drawing both their attention and their scorn, the Dresden art critics reportedly found the painting too raw and blunt, though even they were forced to admire the undeniable strength and intensity of its colour. Richard Stiller wrote that 'The White Woman [sic]' spoke 'in a loud, raw accent', while Paul Fechter complained that the 'feeling for the meaning of spatial relationships' had been 'submerged' by the work's 'stress on colour' (R. Stiller, 'Emil Richters Kunstsalon', in Dresdener Anzeiger, 260, 19 September 1908 and P. Fechter, 'Kunstsalon Richter', in Dresdener neueste Nachrichten, 254, 17 September 1908, both reproduced in D.E. Gordon, 'Kirchner in Dresden', in The Art Bulletin, XLVIII, 1966, p. 344).

The boldness and intensity of Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid is in fact a triumphalism; a demonstration of the new found ease with which Kirchner now commanded his materials. Flamboyant and exuberant, the painting is a joyful conglomeration of the many styles and influences Kirchner had been seeking out and absorbing since the founding of Die Brücke in 1905. A sun filled work on a happy theme, it is essentially a joyous exercise in colour and painterly texture almost for its own sake, its subject matter indeed becoming 'submerged' to the point where it becomes almost secondary to the spectacular abstract painterliness of the surface.

Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid depicts Kirchner's first girlfriend Emmy Frisch seated in the sunlight on the beach in Fehmarn. Kirchner and Emmy Frisch (who was later to become Mrs Schmidt-Rottluff) along with her brother Hans, who is probably the young man depicted in the background of this painting, all spent the summer of 1908 together on the remote island of Fehmarn. For Kirchner it was his first visit to the Baltic island which over the next few years would prompt the creation of many of his greatest masterpieces.

The paintings Kirchner made in Fehmarn in the summer of 1908 reflect the first coming together of the many influences he had absorbed since die Brücke had first formed in 1905 and their conglomeration into a new, unique, though still composite style. As the thick swirling layers of colour in this painting reflect, Kirchner had developed a way of applying colour straight from the tube with a palette knife that combined the vigorous expressive energy of Van Gogh with a faint pointillist technique and a fascination for detail and colour reminiscent of the work of Gustav Klimt. In this portrait of Emmy Frisch in the bright sunlight of the Fehmarn beach all these elements combine in a stunning array of colour brushed, smeared and pasted onto the canvas in such a way that the surface of the picture takes on a free and dynamic life of its own. The renowned Kirchner expert Donald Gordon believed that the composition of this painting, with its emphatic and dominant female figure in the foreground and its smaller male figure almost skulking in the background, was based on the work of Edvard Munch. Kirchner had come heavily under Munch's influence ever since seeing an exhibition of the Norwegian artist's graphic work at the Art Association of Saxony in Dresden in 1906. Many of his paintings of 1908, particularly his famous Strasse now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, clearly betray Munch's influence. Whether the characteristic prominence of dominant women in Munch's art played a part in the way in which Kirchner thought about Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid is open to question. It should be noted however, that the presence of a dominant female figure in Kirchner's art is a distinguishing feature that recurs throughout much of his work over the next ten years.

A typical example of this tendency in Kirchner's work is to be found on the verso of this painting. Painted in 1911, Adam und Eva (Adam and Eve) is an important and, because it has often been hidden by being on the reverse of Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid, a much overlooked painting from the height of Kirchner's mature years in Dresden and Berlin. An apparently secular rendition of the biblical story of the age before the Fall, the painting is essentially a depiction of the kind of primordial age of innocence and instinct that Kirchner and his Brücke colleagues wished to resurrect in the modern world. In its composition, the painting is a strange echo of the earlier painting on the other side of the canvas. Once again, it is the female figure that dominates the canvas, here in the form of the naked figure of Eve. She, too, like the Woman in a white dress is observed by a lesser male, in this case the figure of Adam, who, caught in half shadow, is shown emerging from the bushes behind her. Beyond this however, the similarities between the two paintings end. Adam und Eva is a work from the height of Kirchner's maturity, painted either shortly before he moved from Dresden to Berlin in October 1911, or soon after his arrival in the German capital. Echoing the clear angles and the raw and simple pared down forms of the carved wooden sculptures that Kirchner had made and filled his studio with, the painting's simple earthy language of form reiterates the sense of a noble primitivism championed by its subject matter. Also clearly in evidence in this work is the influence of the ancient Indian paintings of the Ajanta caves on Kirchner at this time. Kirchner had discovered the elegant linear forms of the Buddhist wall paintings through John Griffiths' 1896 photographs and these alongside a renewed interest in Gauguin's use of simple fields of plain flat colour greatly influenced the continual evolution of his style. Here, the gentle tribhanga pose of Eve, the subtle incline of her head and the articulate pointing of her hands clearly echoes the graphic elegance of the Ajanta figures that Kirchner so admired and sought to emulate in works such as this and, for example, his Five Bathers at the Lake of 1911 and now in the Brücke Museum, Berlin.

The subject of Adam and Eve became a recurring motif in Kirchner's art, particularly after his retreat to Davos in 1917, when he produced a number of sculptures and even pieces of furniture depicting the motif. Unlike Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid, Adam und Eva is however, little known in Kirchner's oeuvre. It appears to have been exhibited only once in Frankfurt in 1919, on the few other occasions that the canvas has been seen in public, it has been the better known recto of the painting that has been on display. A tour de force of the artist's early style and one of the most recognisable works of Kirchner's career known widely through numerous reproductions, Frauenbildnis mit Weissem Kleid and Adam und Eva have not been on public display since the Brücke exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in 1964.

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