About Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Akt und Stilleben (Kopie)

Pen and ink and brush on sturdy wove paper
5 5/8 x 9 inches (14,4 x 22,4 cm)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Sitzende Dodo

1909
Coloured chalk on firm, grey laid paper
12 3/8 x 8 5/8 inches (31,5 x 22 cm)

The drawing shows Kirchner's companion from the Dresden years, the milliner Doris (‘Dodo’) Grosse, his favourite model during this period.
The work on paper, which is still a manifestation of Kirchner's magnificent ‘soft’ and rounder formal language from the Expressionist's early Dresden period in powerful and linear strokes, is exemplary of Kirchner's free handling of body shapes and faces. Our lively chalk drawing is a result of his infinite creative energy and the artist's unique ability to express himself through drawing.

On the reverse is a print of the 2nd state of the drypoint etching ‘Portrait of Painter Huber’. It shows Hermann Huber (1888-1967), one of the most important Swiss Expressionists, in three-quarter profile in front of a landscape. From 1910 onwards, Huber was represented at the famous modern art exhibitions in Germany (e.g. the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912) and Kirchner drew him several times. He probably got to know him better later during his years in Davos through their mutual friend Otto Meyer-Amden, who spent the last two years of his life in Huber's house on the Au peninsula in Lake Zurich.