Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

This work is listed in the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archives, Wichtrach/Bern.


One of the first of Kirchner’s street scenes, Im Großen Garten in Dresden (Spaziergänger im Park) is a preparation for the large oil in the Museum of Modern Art in New York Strasse, of 1908. The surrounding is still more rural, what becomes a street is a path in the park and the pedestrians are mothers with children. The background is dominated by rampant plants, the figures are set in front of it, not without idyllic elements, which then disappear in Berlin from autumn 1911 onwards. Kirchner presents children at the goldfish pond, well-dressed men and women on a Sunday walk, the ladies always with the over-sized hats, which fascinated him not only with pedestrians, but are also dominant in the café scenes and portraits of ladies. The hat becomes more important than `Dodo’. Kirchner has filled the sheet with people, landscape and objects in varying confident lines, often set so tightly, that he almost drowns parts of the sheet in black ink. […] The figures exude an almost Sunday-like calm. They are not static, but in motion. Kirchner impressively mastered the problem of integrating the figures into the landscape. The depth of the background is emphasized even more by the brightness of the foreground.’ (Translation of Robert Norbert Ketterer's note on the present lot in: R.N. Ketterer & W. Henze (ed.), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Zeichnungen und Pastelle, Stuttgart/Zurich, 1979).