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Lot Essay
This work is listed in the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archive, Wichtrach/Bern (dated '1906').
‘Our Dresden years were filled with free and fanatical work on the naked figure, either in a meagre studio (or store) or at the Moritzburg lakes. This constant work finally brought results and the solution, with new means, to the problem of representing naked figures, free in the great outdoors of Nature. In unbroken colours, blue, red, green and yellow, people’s bodies now glowed in the water or between the trees.’
(Kirchner, quoted in Die Badenden: Mensch und Natur im deutschen Expressionismus, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 2000, p. 46)
Focusing on a trio of nude female figures reclining amongst the rich green vegetation of the forest floor, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Badende in der Wiese offers a tantalising glimpse into the heady, free lifestyle enjoyed by the Brücke artists during their summer sojourns to the lakes of Moritzburg. Situated in the forests just northeast of Dresden, this small hamlet had become an artistic arcadia during the summers of 1909-1911, offering Kirchner and his comrades, Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein, an idyllic environment to escape to, away from the hectic life of the city. In this lush, verdant location the artists spent their days bathing and frolicking with their female companions in the open air, working on their canvases directly alongside one another, painting the nude form in the natural world, and pushing their techniques to new levels of Expressionism. Created during their first summer in Moritzburg, as the Brücke artists sought a return to a deliberately simple and consciously more primitive life, Badende in der Wiese is an early example of the seminal series of paintings that Kirchner was inspired to produce as a result of his experiences. Encapsulating the collective ideals and shared aesthetic that the Brücke artists developed at Moritzburg, it illustrates the idealised vision of man living freely and harmoniously within nature that Kirchner, Heckel and Pechstein sought to create along the secluded lakeshore.
The nude was a key motif in Kirchner’s art of this period; described as the foundation of all visual arts in the Brücke-Chronik, it frequently appeared as the central focus of his sketches, prints, photographs and paintings. In these works, the artist, his painterly colleagues and their companions were seen naked, freely moving around Kirchner’s studio, conversing, playing games, bathing, sketching, and making love. A new sense of liberated sexuality dominated this space, where clothes were frequently cast aside upon entry, dance and free movement were seen as an essential vitalist expression of life, and sex occurred uninhibited by traditional social taboos. The summers in Moritzburg successfully transferred the bohemian revelry of the Dresden studio into an open-air setting, allowing the artist’s alternative lifestyle to bleed into the natural world. The present work is marked by a similar raw sensuality to the studio paintings, as the three nude female models recline together on the forest floor, their bodies pressed against one another, limbs overlapping and intertwining as they lounge in the verdant green landscape. While the physical closeness of the women imbues the painting with a powerful sense of eroticism, Kirchner maintains a delicate balance between innocence and self-awareness in his depiction of their relationship. The lack of eye contact between the three models and the artist creates the impression that they remain unaware of his attention, and have been caught in a state of natural repose, engaged in easy conversation with one another as they lie in the sunshine. Removing them from any allegorical and mythological context, Kirchner presents his three muses as timeless expressions of pure vitality, rooted in the rich, flourishing greenery of nature.
Executed using flowing, sinuous brushstrokes and vibrant complementary colours, Badende in der Wiese illustrates the growing boldness of Kirchner’s technique at Moritzburg, and highlights his attempts to capture the essence of life with an unadulterated directness, driven by his own subjective, spontaneous intuition alone. This focus on free expression and dedication to an immediate rendering of impressions reflected the Brücke artists’ belief that man’s true response to nature and his or her environment could best be conveyed through natural instinct alone, and that such a raw and direct response would free their art from the cultural conditioning of modern life. Pursuing this ideal, Kirchner reduced draughtsmanship to a minimum in the present composition, outlining just the gentle curves of his models’ breasts, the edge of a shoulder or cheek, or an extended arm or leg to delineate their lithe bodies. The vivid colour palette, meanwhile, lends a powerful vitality to the composition, the rich interplay of green and yellow fusing the female bodies with the surrounding landscape. As he explained in 1923, his paintings from this period were ‘not coloured form…but constructed with colour,’ begun not with ‘a linear drawing of objects, but rather with areas of colour from which the forms of the objects gradually take shape’ (Kirchner, quoted in exh. cat., “No one else has these colours.” Kirchner’s Paintings, Davos, 2011, p. 73). Kirchner revisited the painting in 1926 to heighten these colour effects, enhancing the tones in the vast swathes of green that dominate the canvas to further embed the figures in the rich forest environment, rooting them in the landscape, and creating a visual union between man and nature.
The emergence of such powerfully vibrant colour contrasts in Kirchner’s art at this time points to the influence of Henri Matisse, whom he had first encountered at the artist’s inaugural solo-exhibition in Germany, held in Berlin in the opening months of 1909. The Fauvist’s rejection of traditional tonal shading and perspective, and use of heightened, often unnatural and unmixed colour inspired Kirchner to push the boundaries of his own style to new extremes, and to use an increasingly striking colouristic vocabulary and loose, free brushwork to render his impressions of life at the Moritzburg lakes. In Badende in der Wiese, Kirchner’s simplification of form and the immediacy of his rendering of the scene are more extreme than examples of Matisse’s work from this period, and demonstrate his clear determination to forge his own unique style in the avant-garde art scene.
‘Our Dresden years were filled with free and fanatical work on the naked figure, either in a meagre studio (or store) or at the Moritzburg lakes. This constant work finally brought results and the solution, with new means, to the problem of representing naked figures, free in the great outdoors of Nature. In unbroken colours, blue, red, green and yellow, people’s bodies now glowed in the water or between the trees.’
(Kirchner, quoted in Die Badenden: Mensch und Natur im deutschen Expressionismus, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 2000, p. 46)
Focusing on a trio of nude female figures reclining amongst the rich green vegetation of the forest floor, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Badende in der Wiese offers a tantalising glimpse into the heady, free lifestyle enjoyed by the Brücke artists during their summer sojourns to the lakes of Moritzburg. Situated in the forests just northeast of Dresden, this small hamlet had become an artistic arcadia during the summers of 1909-1911, offering Kirchner and his comrades, Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein, an idyllic environment to escape to, away from the hectic life of the city. In this lush, verdant location the artists spent their days bathing and frolicking with their female companions in the open air, working on their canvases directly alongside one another, painting the nude form in the natural world, and pushing their techniques to new levels of Expressionism. Created during their first summer in Moritzburg, as the Brücke artists sought a return to a deliberately simple and consciously more primitive life, Badende in der Wiese is an early example of the seminal series of paintings that Kirchner was inspired to produce as a result of his experiences. Encapsulating the collective ideals and shared aesthetic that the Brücke artists developed at Moritzburg, it illustrates the idealised vision of man living freely and harmoniously within nature that Kirchner, Heckel and Pechstein sought to create along the secluded lakeshore.
The nude was a key motif in Kirchner’s art of this period; described as the foundation of all visual arts in the Brücke-Chronik, it frequently appeared as the central focus of his sketches, prints, photographs and paintings. In these works, the artist, his painterly colleagues and their companions were seen naked, freely moving around Kirchner’s studio, conversing, playing games, bathing, sketching, and making love. A new sense of liberated sexuality dominated this space, where clothes were frequently cast aside upon entry, dance and free movement were seen as an essential vitalist expression of life, and sex occurred uninhibited by traditional social taboos. The summers in Moritzburg successfully transferred the bohemian revelry of the Dresden studio into an open-air setting, allowing the artist’s alternative lifestyle to bleed into the natural world. The present work is marked by a similar raw sensuality to the studio paintings, as the three nude female models recline together on the forest floor, their bodies pressed against one another, limbs overlapping and intertwining as they lounge in the verdant green landscape. While the physical closeness of the women imbues the painting with a powerful sense of eroticism, Kirchner maintains a delicate balance between innocence and self-awareness in his depiction of their relationship. The lack of eye contact between the three models and the artist creates the impression that they remain unaware of his attention, and have been caught in a state of natural repose, engaged in easy conversation with one another as they lie in the sunshine. Removing them from any allegorical and mythological context, Kirchner presents his three muses as timeless expressions of pure vitality, rooted in the rich, flourishing greenery of nature.
Executed using flowing, sinuous brushstrokes and vibrant complementary colours, Badende in der Wiese illustrates the growing boldness of Kirchner’s technique at Moritzburg, and highlights his attempts to capture the essence of life with an unadulterated directness, driven by his own subjective, spontaneous intuition alone. This focus on free expression and dedication to an immediate rendering of impressions reflected the Brücke artists’ belief that man’s true response to nature and his or her environment could best be conveyed through natural instinct alone, and that such a raw and direct response would free their art from the cultural conditioning of modern life. Pursuing this ideal, Kirchner reduced draughtsmanship to a minimum in the present composition, outlining just the gentle curves of his models’ breasts, the edge of a shoulder or cheek, or an extended arm or leg to delineate their lithe bodies. The vivid colour palette, meanwhile, lends a powerful vitality to the composition, the rich interplay of green and yellow fusing the female bodies with the surrounding landscape. As he explained in 1923, his paintings from this period were ‘not coloured form…but constructed with colour,’ begun not with ‘a linear drawing of objects, but rather with areas of colour from which the forms of the objects gradually take shape’ (Kirchner, quoted in exh. cat., “No one else has these colours.” Kirchner’s Paintings, Davos, 2011, p. 73). Kirchner revisited the painting in 1926 to heighten these colour effects, enhancing the tones in the vast swathes of green that dominate the canvas to further embed the figures in the rich forest environment, rooting them in the landscape, and creating a visual union between man and nature.
The emergence of such powerfully vibrant colour contrasts in Kirchner’s art at this time points to the influence of Henri Matisse, whom he had first encountered at the artist’s inaugural solo-exhibition in Germany, held in Berlin in the opening months of 1909. The Fauvist’s rejection of traditional tonal shading and perspective, and use of heightened, often unnatural and unmixed colour inspired Kirchner to push the boundaries of his own style to new extremes, and to use an increasingly striking colouristic vocabulary and loose, free brushwork to render his impressions of life at the Moritzburg lakes. In Badende in der Wiese, Kirchner’s simplification of form and the immediacy of his rendering of the scene are more extreme than examples of Matisse’s work from this period, and demonstrate his clear determination to forge his own unique style in the avant-garde art scene.