Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Two women 1912 Pastel and charcoal on brownish paper. 43,5 x 33,5 cm. Framed under glass. Signed and dated in pencil lower left 'E L Kirchner 12'. Dated, titled and inscribed 'Zwei Frauen 1912 Pastel' on the reverse. - Pencil sketch of a man's head on the reverse. - In good condition. Provenance Collection Max Sauerlandt, Hamburg; Grisebach Berlin, auction 24, May 29, 1992, lot 23; Lempertz Cologne, auction 746, June 7, 1997, lot 1280; Private collection North Rhine-Westphalia Literature Gerd Presler, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Seine Frauen, seine Modelle, seine Bilder, Munich/New York 1998, pp. 73 f. with color illustrations; Magdalena M. Moeller, Von Dresden nach Davos. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Zeichnungen, Munich 2004, p. 123, with ill. 36 With "Two Women" an important portrait from one of the most interesting creative phases of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner can be offered. The pastel drawing, widely elaborated in decidedly set layers of strokes, was created in 1912, a time of upheaval in Kirchner's life and work. In 1911 he had moved from Dresden to the pulsating metropolis of Berlin and had taken a studio apartment in a house where Max Pechstein also lived. Life in the big city, which was characterized by speed, anonymity and a debauched nightlife, had a great influence on Kirchner's artistic expression; he captured the new impressions in a personal, sensitive pictorial language. The two sitters are Gerda and Erna Schilling, two sisters whom the artist had met shortly after his move. They had a lasting influence on his private life - at first he was briefly involved with Gerda, but Erna became his permanent partner and remained at his side until his death in 1938. Above all, however, they became his most important models and brought about a significant change in the type of woman in his portrayals. From the rounded lines of the Dresden period, Kirchner now moved to slender, elongated forms that represented the elegant, independent type of the modern metropolitan woman. "The beautiful architecturally constructed, austere bodies of these two girls replaced the soft Saxon bodies. In thousands of drawings, prints, and paintings, these bodies shaped my sense of beauty to form the physically beautiful woman of our time," Kirchner himself wrote in retrospect (quoted in: Magdalene Schlösser, Erna und Gerda Schilling, in: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Berlin, exh. Cat. Brücke Museum Berlin 2008/09, p. 74). The new ideal of beauty finally culminated in the cocottes of his famous Berlin street scenes of 1913/14. Here it manifests itself in the sharp-edged profile lines, the elongated necks and narrow waists of the women, emphasized even more by the flattering lines of their elegant wardrobe. The freshness and immediacy of the drawing is striking, showing the sisters, Gerda on the left, Erna on the right, in intimate dialogue. Kirchner took the composition as a model for the 1913 painting Two Women with Washbasin (Gordon 295, Städel Museum Frankfurt), which, however, is more static in composition and places the women one behind the other in a distancing manner. Not only the extraordinary quality, but also the provenance of the drawing is remarkable, it comes from the important private collection of Max Sauerlandt (1880 - 1934), art historian and director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (see comparative illustration).