We thank Prof. Dr. Günther Gercken for his scientific support. The work will be included in the upcoming catalogue raisonné of Ernst Ludwig Kirchners prints by Prof. Dr. Günther Gercken under the number: 1728.

Provenance: Collection Dr. Hans Werner Riedel and Dr. Ralf Dieter Loher-Riedel, Munich.

Catalogue raisonné: Dube, Nr. W637 e2V.

Literature:
- Gercken, Günther: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Farbige Druckgraphik, Munich 2008 (see. no. 94 - 96).
- Spieler, Reinhard (ed.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Drei Akte im Wald. Hackstücke #1 (published due to the exhibition from 6 March - 24 Mai 2010 at Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen), Ludwigshafen 2010.

“This is becoming a large picture with flecks of sunlight, and a work in progress since 1933” wrote Ernst Ludwig Kirchner on 15 June 1934 to his collector and patron Carl Hagemann (Spieler, Reinhard/ Eiling, Alexander B. (ed.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Drei Akte im Wald. Hackstücke #1, Bielefeld 2010, p. 9.)

The intense examination of the pictorial motif of three nudes in the forest begins as early as 1928/29, however, with a black and white photograph. The three nudes are Erna Schilling and Lotte Kraft-Rohner, standing and seated to the left, and presumably Esther Haufler, who is seated opposite them. The subsequent years see numerous drawings and sketches in which Kirchner plays with this very composition. In addition, in these drawings we also see his experiments with light and shade. In 1933/34 there emerge two worked-up drawings, as well as two watercolours. At the same time he worked on the first woodcuts on this theme. In 1934/35 he painted “Drei Akte im Wald” (three nudes in the forest) which is now in the Wilhlem-Hack Museum Ludwigshafen.

We are offering here at auction an exemplar of No 5 of the woodcuts in the final state: these woodcuts powerfully demonstrate Kirchner’s outstanding skill and his unbelievable love of experimentation when it comes to printing technique. He begins his series of woodcuts by preparing and printing from a black drawing plate, which leads to a black and white woodcut and develops it further to produce a colour woodcut. The next step is the print from 2 colour blocks, where he also works on the image. His mastery in handling woodcuts is clear, whenever he removes the separation between the drawing and colour block, and combines parts of the colour block with the drawing block. In the final state the blocks are cut, thereby allowing the possibility of printing different sequences, with no impression being the same as the next one, and so that each one has its own particular effect.
“Three nudes in the forest” is typical of Kirchner’s late style of the 1930s. He has left behind the angular figures and spontaneous drawing style and turned to a flat and calmer formal language. In this period he was influenced by Picasso’s “linear style of the late 1920s and early 1930s with his large contiguous colour planes and the merging of figure and object in a shared contour.” (quote from: Eiling, ibid, p. 13).

The nude in a landscape is a central theme in Kirchner’s oeuvre, with which he involved himself almost constantly throughout his life. “Throughout his life he saw himself as the painter of modern man and of the nude in the open air, thereby picking up two contrasting themes: he fittingly linked the central polarities of society at the beginning of the 20th century, with modernisation and technical developments on the one hand, and the evocation of a lost unity between man and nature on the other.” (quote from: Eiling, ibid, No. 14) His examination of optical phenomena, in the present example that of the play of light and shadow, also engaged him throughout his life.
In terms of composition he clearly harks back to Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe” of 1863, albeit reduced to the three nudes.