Watercolor over pencil
With stamp of the Kunstmuseum Basel (Lugt 1570 b) and with registration number "A/Da Bb 8" on verso. On firm cardboard. 33,7 x 49,6 cm (13,2 x 19,5 in), the full sheet

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

PROVENANCE: Martha Widmer, Winterthur (1954).
Morton D. May, St. Louis (1957).
E. and A. Silbermann Galleries, New York.
William Mazer.
Galerie Bierhinkel, Baden-Baden (2002).
Private collection Hamburg.

In the watercolor "Damenbildnis", made in the early 1930s, Kirchner reverted to the renowned Berlin street scenes from the years 1913/14. However, it is not any longer the busy high-society ladies who, followed by men, hastily cross Potsdam Square, it is the ‘petit bourgeois’ woman who fearfully looks at the world around her. The excessive Berlin years that have also left their traces on the artist’s state of mind are over. Switzerland, place of refuge and asylum, with its down-to-earth middle class cannot compete with Berlin. Kirchner seeks and finds his motifs in this new environment, however, nor entirely without occasional echoes of the past. The portrait of a young woman appears like a film sequence, striking and fugacious at the same time. [KD].