Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

Kirchner’s Akt mit schwarzem Hut is one of Kirchner’s boldest, most confrontational depictions of the female nude and an icon of German Expressionism. This image of a standing woman, dressed only in slippers, black hat and choker, was inspired by a reproduction of Lucas Cranach’s Venus (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main), which Kirchner had seen in the studio of his fellow artist Otto Mueller. Whilst this was certainly the first inspiration, he presumably also knew Cranach’s Cupid complaining to Venus, possibly the version in London (National Gallery), in which Venus wears an equally incongruous wide-brimmed hat. This large woodcut portrait of Dodo Große, the artist’s girlfriend during his Dresden years, was created in 1912, following his move to Berlin and the break-up with Dodo. It is a highly ambiguous image, poised between seduction and confrontation, and one of the most haunting Expressionist works in any medium. For Kirchner, Dodo remained the ideal model, muse and lover: even many years later, in a diary entry of 1919, he praised her beauty as superior to a Cranach Venus.

The woodcut, which was probably begun in Dresden and completed in Berlin, is closely related to Kirchner’s painting Stehender Akt mit Hut of 1910 (Gordon 163; Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main). In the woodcut however, Kirchner intensified the mannerist tendencies - already present in Cranach’s Venus – by distorting the proportions and elongating the figure even further. It is in woodcuts such as the present Akt mit schwarzem Hut that Kirchner, as Magdalena Moeller wrote, ‘produced his finest pictorial solutions’ (Moeller, Kirchner as a German Artist, p. 25).

We are grateful to Professor Dr. Günther Gercken, Lütjensee, Germany, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. Professor Gerken is currently preparing the catalogue raisonné of prints by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the first two volumes of which (1904-1911) have been published last year (Galerie Kornfeld Verlag, Bern, 2013). Gercken records the present, probably unique impression of the first state, and 11 impressions of the second or third states, two of which are in public collections (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Graphische Sammlung, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart).