Lot: 205
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1880 Aschaffenburg - 1938 Davos
Fehmarnküste. Um 1912/13.
Watercolor and pencil drawing.
Signed lower left. On fine wove paper. 36 x 46,3 cm (14,1 x 18,2 in), the full sheet.

This work is documented in the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archive, Wichtrach/Bern.

PROVENANCE: Private collection South Germany.

After completing his architecture course in Dresden, during which he became acquainted with Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel und Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and began to collaborate with them, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner opposed his father’s wishes and opted for painting as a career. The intensive exchange of ideas among the four friends led to the founding of the artist collective known as “Brücke” in 1905 with the aim of “attracting all forces fomenting revolution” (Schmidt-Rottluff). The artists started with “quarter-hour nudes”, drawing from the model in the studio or outdoors. At first the group was oriented towards Late Impressionism; however, the discovery of the Fauves, Oceanic art and van Gogh’s work induced the four painters to turn to Expressionism. The group’s style was lastingly affected by an encounter with Italian Futurist art around 1910. It became “harsher”. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner studied the sculpture at the Dresden Ethnographic Museum. Impressed by it, Kirchner carved and cut sculptures of wood. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner moved to Berlin in 1911. The urban environment of a metropolis provided Kirchner with a wealth of fresh motifs, which he translated into simplified, crisply contoured forms, expressive qualities and lurid color contrasts. His urban pictures became Expressionist incunabula and made Ernst Ludwig Kirchner one of the most important German artists of the 20\up6 th century.
The months he spent on Fehmarn in the summers between 1912 and 1914 were of crucial importance to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s work. As he had in the summers he spent on the Moritzburg Lakes in his Dresden “Brücke” days, Kirchner experienced nature emotionally and up close on Fehmarn. The watercolors he painted there reveal the signature of the mature artist. At the same time, they are informed as descriptions of landscape by the stringent gestus of a composition that views expressiveness, expression as such, in connection with actual typography. The enormous painterly verve conveyed by our watercolor is upheld by an elated feeling for carefree living as it can develop on the Baltic. His masterly handling of the visual elements between the pure surface of the paper and the watercolor washes reveals Kirchner’s consummate skill in the medium and the assurance which, particularly in the years before the first world war, marked a high point in the artist’s work.
In 1920 his expressive handling became calmer and his pictures were given a tapestry-like surface quality. He also produced an important body of graphic works in the form of woodcuts, lithographs and pen drawings. In 1923 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner moved into the “Haus auf dem Wildboden” at the head of the Sertig Valley, where he lived and worked until he took his own life in 1938. [KD]

Good overall impression.

EUR: 20.000 - 30.000 REGEL(7%)
US$: 27.280 - 40.920