What looks like sketched out spontaneously appears in fact to have been carefully planned and composed: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) revealingly stages the bodies of skimpily dressed or nude female models, edgy, fragmentally faceted, with tapering angular shapes, at his Berlin place of work in his 1912 painting
Nude Models at the Studio. Leaning, sitting, and standing, four female figures of staggered heights direct the eye into the depths of the interior with stovepipe, folding screen, mirror, and exotic sitting furniture. In clearly delineated color fields—red, blue, white, ocher, green—developed into carriers of meaning with flat, strong parallel brushstrokes, the nervously shimmering depiction of the scene conveys an impression of hectic big city life in the Berlin of the early 1920s. The effect is heightened by the markedly frayed and jagged, hatching-like contours. These are typical of the early phase of this co-founder of the Dresden artist group Die Brücke and exponent of German Expressionism.
MH, 2021
