Negertanz

Executed circa 1911, long before the jazz craze swept through Europe in the 1920s, this watercolour is a dramatic pictorial expression of the raw energy and excitement that such music provoked and the wild, energetic and thrilling dancing that it gave rise to. For the Die Brücke artists, as for their philosophical mentor, Friedrich Nietzsche, dancing, as an elemental and primordial human expression, was one of the most important of the arts. As in painting, it was especially to tribal, folk and primitive forms of dance, as opposed to overcomplicated, restrained and classically derived forms of dance that these artists were drawn, for it was in these forms that, as it was for Nietzsche, dance became a truly undiluted, joyous and instinctive outward bodily expression of inner human emotion and was to manifest itself in its true Dionysian form.

Formerly in the collection of Dr Carl Hagemann – one of the great patrons of Die Brücke art – Negertanz is one of the earliest Expressionist depictions of such dancing. Most probably painted in Berlin, it depicts two black dancers wildly dancing in front of group of suited men, possibly members of a band or orchestra. With its swiftly drawn lines and bold sweeps of colour hastily rendered, the watercolour deliberately captures the atmosphere of immediacy and excitement generated by the dance. Its composition is such that it also seems to sway along with the music. Indeed so successful is the composition of this work – which may well have grown from a sketch in front of the spectacle into this watercolour rendering – that it is this work that forms the blueprint for Kirchner’s large 1911 painting of the same subject: the oil painting Negertanz now in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein–Westfalen in Dusseldorf.