拍品專文
In the autumn of 1911 Kirchner, Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff moved to Berlin where the two other members of Die Brücke, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller, were already living. Here the individuality of each artist gradually began to emerge out of the collective Brücke style. Kirchner's own strong personality and his move to a more independent style eventually led to the group's collapse in 1913.
Kirchner spent the summers of 1912 and 1913 in Fehmarn, a remote island in the Baltic sea which provided an idyllic contrast to the tension of cosmopolitan city life in Berlin. These years are generally considered as the peak of Kirchner's Strassenszene period (see Lot 95) and it is thus fascinating to see the jagged, angular style of his metropolitan pictures imposed on the formal summer landscapes of Fehmarn.
Infact, Fehmarn subjects comprised almost half of the artist's painting production in the years 1912 and 1913, and it was here that Kirchner developed a totally arbitrary and highly cerebral use of colour; "in this primitive and bizarre environment Kirchner finally found that inner freedom to explore the private world of longing and fantasy which he had desired as a young man at the turn of the century." (D. E. Gordon, op. cit., p. 80.).
"Kirchner's 1913 style unifies into an integrated dynamic approach drawing upon earlier innovations in the handling of space, mass, brushstroke, colour and compositional form. Formal ambiguity, pictorial contrast, and the jagged angle are hallmarks of the style. The stroke is uniformly vibrant and electric, with zigzags and angular accents animating most shapes within every composition. Space is increasingly arbitrary, with scale and recessional elements distorted for heightened two-dimensional impact. Curve is subordinated to angle, but both are used with bold audacity, departing from natural relationships at will and varying shape distortions from picture to picture in accordance with the artist's momentary expressional needs. Yellow returns tentatively to the palette, and either red or blue is occasionally the dominant hue, allowing the artist to range freely across the centre colour spectrum - playing off adjacent versus complementary colours, warms against cools, intense tones against neutralised shades, secondary versus primary hues, with a stunning variety of expressional power...The 1913 style displays a mature equilibrium in the use of this widely varied formal vocabulary" (D. E. Gordon, ibid, p. 86).
Major works painted in Fehmarn are housed in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (Gordon 336), the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit (Gordon 331) and the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt (Gordon 330).
Kirchner spent the summers of 1912 and 1913 in Fehmarn, a remote island in the Baltic sea which provided an idyllic contrast to the tension of cosmopolitan city life in Berlin. These years are generally considered as the peak of Kirchner's Strassenszene period (see Lot 95) and it is thus fascinating to see the jagged, angular style of his metropolitan pictures imposed on the formal summer landscapes of Fehmarn.
Infact, Fehmarn subjects comprised almost half of the artist's painting production in the years 1912 and 1913, and it was here that Kirchner developed a totally arbitrary and highly cerebral use of colour; "in this primitive and bizarre environment Kirchner finally found that inner freedom to explore the private world of longing and fantasy which he had desired as a young man at the turn of the century." (D. E. Gordon, op. cit., p. 80.).
"Kirchner's 1913 style unifies into an integrated dynamic approach drawing upon earlier innovations in the handling of space, mass, brushstroke, colour and compositional form. Formal ambiguity, pictorial contrast, and the jagged angle are hallmarks of the style. The stroke is uniformly vibrant and electric, with zigzags and angular accents animating most shapes within every composition. Space is increasingly arbitrary, with scale and recessional elements distorted for heightened two-dimensional impact. Curve is subordinated to angle, but both are used with bold audacity, departing from natural relationships at will and varying shape distortions from picture to picture in accordance with the artist's momentary expressional needs. Yellow returns tentatively to the palette, and either red or blue is occasionally the dominant hue, allowing the artist to range freely across the centre colour spectrum - playing off adjacent versus complementary colours, warms against cools, intense tones against neutralised shades, secondary versus primary hues, with a stunning variety of expressional power...The 1913 style displays a mature equilibrium in the use of this widely varied formal vocabulary" (D. E. Gordon, ibid, p. 86).
Major works painted in Fehmarn are housed in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (Gordon 336), the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit (Gordon 331) and the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt (Gordon 330).