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Lot Essay
After Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s move to Berlin in 1911, the Baltic island of Fehmarn replaced Moritzburg as the artist’s summer destination. It was there, as he wrote excitedly to a friend during the summer of 1912, that, for the first time, ‘I painted pictures that are absolutely mature, insofar as I myself can judge. Ochre, blue and green are the colours of Fehmarn, and the coastline is wonderful. At times with a South Sea opulence...’ (Letter to Gustav Schliefer, Summer, 1912 quoted in L. Grisebach, Kirchner, Cologne, 1999, p. 92).
As Donald Gordon has written, through their colour alone the paintings that Kirchner made on Fehmarn are ones that ‘rank among the revolutionary achievements of his generation of painters’ (D. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, London, 1968, p. 80). But it was not just the radical and often surprisingly radiant colour harmonies of the works that Kirchner produced during his time in Fehmarn that was revolutionary. Compositionally innovative and painted using a new, masterful style of angular, feathered, directional brushstrokes, these pictures were ones that luxuriated in articulating an idyllic pastoral world of dynamic energy, and evocative colour. It was a liberated world of raw, spontaneous impulse and a sense of enjoyment in all around him that served as a conscious and direct counterpart to the often edgy, nervous and cramped atmosphere of the city paintings that Kirchner was then making in the metropolis of Berlin. Today Kirchner’s Fehmarn pictures are recognised, alongside his famous Berlin streetscenes, as marking the absolute highpoint of the artist’s career and the pinnacle of the unique Expressionist style of painting that Kirchner perfected in the years running up to the First World War.
Painted, on the island in 1912, Leuchtturm hinter Bucht is one of a rare and celebrated sequence of Fehmarn paintings depicting the Staberhuk lighthouse and the curvaceous bay – sometimes whimsically dubbed by the artist, ‘Mexico Bay’ – that extends beneath it. Kirchner was enthralled by both the lighthouse and the coastal landscape that surrounded it and painted these motifs repeatedly during the summers of 1912 and 1913. Situated on the South side of the island, the Staberhuk lighthouse was where Kirchner regularly used to reside when he stayed in Fehmarn, renting an adjoining building from the lighthouse keeper Ernst Friedrich Lüthmann and his family.
Between 1912 and 1913, Kirchner retuned again and again to the subject of the Staberhuk lighthouse, painting it from several different views. The vast majority of these paintings are now housed in museums such as the Folkwang Museum, Essen, the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In the Carnegie Institute’s picture, Kirchner depicted the lighthouse from an innovative and unusual viewpoint above the tower adopting a similar technique as in his depictions of the monuments and buildings of Berlin and Halle at this time. In other works, such as the Folkwang Museum’s painting, Kirchner painted the lighthouse as an integrated part of the landscape and a commanding presence over the bay. In yet others, such as his large-scale masterpiece of 1912, Ins Meer schreitende now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the lighthouse appears merely as a surprising architectural counterpart to his two, equally totemic, female nudes seen striding so boldly into the sea.
Leuchtturm hinter Bucht depicts a favourite scene of Kirchner’s – the beach, known as ‘An die Steinen,’ with its boulders and dunes that was situated just below the lighthouse and was the location where he and his friends would spend most of their time bathing and painting. It was here, for example, that, as Nikolaus Lüthmann, one of the lighthouse keeper’s sons has recalled, Kirchner would regularly stand on the beach with outstretched arms and cry out: ‘Oh Staberhuk, how glorious you are, happiness in a quiet corner, a place of peaceful beauty!’ (E. Kirchner quoted in K. Schick, ‘“Happiness in a Quiet Corner”, Kirchner on Fehmarn’ in Vibrant Metropolis, Idyllic Nature, Kirchner – The Berlin Years, exh. cat., Zurich, 2017, p. 36). So happy was Kirchner in Fehmarn that he would visit again in 1913 and in 1914 when his summer was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War. After this he was never again to visit, though his letters reveal that for the rest of his life, he would often dream of doing so.
Fusing the curvature of the bay with the arch of coastline, its beach, boulders and high sand dunes leading up to the lighthouse in a dynamic and innovative composition, Leuchtturm hinter Bucht is, therefore, both a ‘revolutionary’ image and also a homage to the place that Kirchner regarded as a ‘quiet corner of happiness and peaceful beauty’ (ibid.).
As Donald Gordon has written, through their colour alone the paintings that Kirchner made on Fehmarn are ones that ‘rank among the revolutionary achievements of his generation of painters’ (D. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, London, 1968, p. 80). But it was not just the radical and often surprisingly radiant colour harmonies of the works that Kirchner produced during his time in Fehmarn that was revolutionary. Compositionally innovative and painted using a new, masterful style of angular, feathered, directional brushstrokes, these pictures were ones that luxuriated in articulating an idyllic pastoral world of dynamic energy, and evocative colour. It was a liberated world of raw, spontaneous impulse and a sense of enjoyment in all around him that served as a conscious and direct counterpart to the often edgy, nervous and cramped atmosphere of the city paintings that Kirchner was then making in the metropolis of Berlin. Today Kirchner’s Fehmarn pictures are recognised, alongside his famous Berlin streetscenes, as marking the absolute highpoint of the artist’s career and the pinnacle of the unique Expressionist style of painting that Kirchner perfected in the years running up to the First World War.
Painted, on the island in 1912, Leuchtturm hinter Bucht is one of a rare and celebrated sequence of Fehmarn paintings depicting the Staberhuk lighthouse and the curvaceous bay – sometimes whimsically dubbed by the artist, ‘Mexico Bay’ – that extends beneath it. Kirchner was enthralled by both the lighthouse and the coastal landscape that surrounded it and painted these motifs repeatedly during the summers of 1912 and 1913. Situated on the South side of the island, the Staberhuk lighthouse was where Kirchner regularly used to reside when he stayed in Fehmarn, renting an adjoining building from the lighthouse keeper Ernst Friedrich Lüthmann and his family.
Between 1912 and 1913, Kirchner retuned again and again to the subject of the Staberhuk lighthouse, painting it from several different views. The vast majority of these paintings are now housed in museums such as the Folkwang Museum, Essen, the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In the Carnegie Institute’s picture, Kirchner depicted the lighthouse from an innovative and unusual viewpoint above the tower adopting a similar technique as in his depictions of the monuments and buildings of Berlin and Halle at this time. In other works, such as the Folkwang Museum’s painting, Kirchner painted the lighthouse as an integrated part of the landscape and a commanding presence over the bay. In yet others, such as his large-scale masterpiece of 1912, Ins Meer schreitende now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the lighthouse appears merely as a surprising architectural counterpart to his two, equally totemic, female nudes seen striding so boldly into the sea.
Leuchtturm hinter Bucht depicts a favourite scene of Kirchner’s – the beach, known as ‘An die Steinen,’ with its boulders and dunes that was situated just below the lighthouse and was the location where he and his friends would spend most of their time bathing and painting. It was here, for example, that, as Nikolaus Lüthmann, one of the lighthouse keeper’s sons has recalled, Kirchner would regularly stand on the beach with outstretched arms and cry out: ‘Oh Staberhuk, how glorious you are, happiness in a quiet corner, a place of peaceful beauty!’ (E. Kirchner quoted in K. Schick, ‘“Happiness in a Quiet Corner”, Kirchner on Fehmarn’ in Vibrant Metropolis, Idyllic Nature, Kirchner – The Berlin Years, exh. cat., Zurich, 2017, p. 36). So happy was Kirchner in Fehmarn that he would visit again in 1913 and in 1914 when his summer was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War. After this he was never again to visit, though his letters reveal that for the rest of his life, he would often dream of doing so.
Fusing the curvature of the bay with the arch of coastline, its beach, boulders and high sand dunes leading up to the lighthouse in a dynamic and innovative composition, Leuchtturm hinter Bucht is, therefore, both a ‘revolutionary’ image and also a homage to the place that Kirchner regarded as a ‘quiet corner of happiness and peaceful beauty’ (ibid.).