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Lot Essay
Executed in Dresden during the late spring of 1910 Waldstrasse is painted at a pivotal moment in Kirchners Brücke career when his method of painting finally liberated itself from the strongly Van Gogh influenced brushwork of his early period. Here we can see Kirchner's confidence as he applies his paint quickly and confidently, wet on wet, across his canvas. In essence this Dresden painting is a precursor to his splendidly liberal bathers landscapes he painted in Moritzburg in the summer of the same year.
These landscapes mirror the experiments of Schmidt-Rottluff who above all the other Brücke artists pushed the boundaries of liberal paint application and freedom of line to their extreme in his superb colourist works of 1910(see fig.1).
In these pivotal paintings of 1910 Kirchner also adds to his technical armoury a liberal use of black, both to outline his composition and to add contrast to the brilliant raw colours which he is becoming more and more confident to use. Gordon points out:
"The black contours themselves begin to take on expressive autonomy ... The black contours in Forest Road (G136):the present picture and in In the Forest (G142) are so varied in length and direction that they exceed their role as mere outline in order to vie for pictoral dominance with the intense blue, green, and orange tones used for objects." (D. Gordon, Kirchner, 1968 p.67-8).
It was these landscape paintings of 1910 by Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff and Kirchner which established the Brücke painters, not as plagiarists following the 'French Style', but a band of young German artists with a clear direction and a dramatic painting style of their own.
In his introduction to the Galerie Arnhold show of September 1910, simply entitled Dic Brücke, Kirchner announced that the group was striving "to clear a way for the efforts of the New German Art". Fechter had already recorded in receiving their exhibition the year previous that the group had "a stronger sense of their having understood their goals...." and that no Brücke exhibition has produced so unified an effect! Now in 1910 the young artists chose eighty-eight of their best and most radical works, including forty oils to prove their point. Amongst the small group chosen by Kirchner was Waldstrasse. Until recently the spontinaeity of the painting technique and the brilliant tones of his raw pigments have been hidden by a discoloured varnish. With this varnish now removed the work has an immediacy and impact which has remained hidden for some years.
Waldstrasse has remained in the same collection for some 50 years and was last exhibited in the 1960s, having been shown in Dresden at Galerie Arnhold in 1910.
These landscapes mirror the experiments of Schmidt-Rottluff who above all the other Brücke artists pushed the boundaries of liberal paint application and freedom of line to their extreme in his superb colourist works of 1910(see fig.1).
In these pivotal paintings of 1910 Kirchner also adds to his technical armoury a liberal use of black, both to outline his composition and to add contrast to the brilliant raw colours which he is becoming more and more confident to use. Gordon points out:
"The black contours themselves begin to take on expressive autonomy ... The black contours in Forest Road (G136):the present picture and in In the Forest (G142) are so varied in length and direction that they exceed their role as mere outline in order to vie for pictoral dominance with the intense blue, green, and orange tones used for objects." (D. Gordon, Kirchner, 1968 p.67-8).
It was these landscape paintings of 1910 by Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff and Kirchner which established the Brücke painters, not as plagiarists following the 'French Style', but a band of young German artists with a clear direction and a dramatic painting style of their own.
In his introduction to the Galerie Arnhold show of September 1910, simply entitled Dic Brücke, Kirchner announced that the group was striving "to clear a way for the efforts of the New German Art". Fechter had already recorded in receiving their exhibition the year previous that the group had "a stronger sense of their having understood their goals...." and that no Brücke exhibition has produced so unified an effect! Now in 1910 the young artists chose eighty-eight of their best and most radical works, including forty oils to prove their point. Amongst the small group chosen by Kirchner was Waldstrasse. Until recently the spontinaeity of the painting technique and the brilliant tones of his raw pigments have been hidden by a discoloured varnish. With this varnish now removed the work has an immediacy and impact which has remained hidden for some years.
Waldstrasse has remained in the same collection for some 50 years and was last exhibited in the 1960s, having been shown in Dresden at Galerie Arnhold in 1910.