Being Kirchner's Model
Relocating from the "Haus in den Lärchen" to the "Wildbodenhaus" near the Sertig valley seemed to have rekindled Kirchner's interest in making studio and living space the stage of his painting. Naturally, it usually was Erna Schilling, his most grateful model, either alone or together with people who visited Kirchner in the remote valley more frequently. They often posed for him, the restless artist, all day long over the course of several days. One of the models was Lena Brubacher (1904-1991), Hermann Scherer's girlfriend, whom she followed from Basel to Frauenkirch in early 1924. Scherer had spent time at Kirchners on several occasions since 1922, usually in order to learn from him and to develop his own style, just like other Basel artists such as Paul Camenisch and Albert Müller, together with whom he founded the "Red-Blue" artist group.
The young Lena Brubacher spent several hours posing nude at the 'Wildbodenhaus' almost every day, inspiring her lover Hermann Scherer and Kirchner, who warmly welcomed her youthful body as an artistic stimulus. After two to three weeks, however, she turned her back on the Wildbodenhaus, physically and mentally drained. Etchings, woodcuts, sketches and finally the painting document Lena's visit at Wildbodenhaus; surprisingly, there are no photographs of Kirchner that document the visits, as Kirchner would usually have done. (Cf.: Martin Schwander, Mit Lena im Wildbodenhaus, in: Hermann Scherer, Kerben und Kanten, Zurich 2022, pp. 20f.)

Lena as a Woven Model
So we see Lena with her slightly wavy, reddish-blond hair, seemingly relaxed on a kilim-covered chaise longue in the artist's living room. The left side of her face is partly covered by a lush bouquet of flowers, while the artist enriched the scene, which was painted in January or February, with fruit in a bowl carved by Kirchner. The background is dominated by a large tapestry with the motif "Paar mit Kind", a design from 1923, which the textile artist Lise Gujer, an acquaintance of Kirchner's since 1922, executed as an interlocked warp knitting with linen warp and colored wool weft.
However, Kirchner only sketched half of the 85 x 241 cm tapestry - only the cropped face of the woman behind the child on the left is still visible - and he added a richness of color to the woven fabric that the artist must have missed in the original work. It was only posthumously in the 1950s that Lise Gujer would revisit the theme and use brightly colored wool yarns. (Cf. Eberhard W. Kornfeld, Textilarbeiten nach Entwürfen von E. L. Kirchner, Bern 1999, p. 20)
And in passing, Kirchner mentions an important development of his work, a first document of his collaboration with Lise Gujer, initiated in 1922, who worked as a weaver and, at the artist's suggestion, created interlocked weavings based on his designs. As described, the present work was created in 1923; while Lise Gujer created further versions after the artist's death. Kirchner criticized the insufficient colorfulness of the first three works as a result of the overly intense effect of the linen warp. Of great rarity, only one contemporary copy of each of the three early works from 1922 to 1923 is known.
And on the left in the background, Kirchner also cites one of his many carved seats, here "Stuhl mit großem Akt" on the backrest. Kirchner had made this unusual piece of furniture from Swiss stone pine and painted it with ox blood while he still lived in the Haus in den Lärchen in 1920. Surrounded by the stage-like setting of the living and working space, Kirchner shows Lena Brubacher with a tense aloofness.
The vibrant setting with its still-life-like elements also reveals this nude to be a psychogram of the artist himself and is typical of his painting in the mid-1920s. [MvL]