Browse by Title
| Title: : 1 of 1 |
| Bathers Beneath Trees, Fehmarn, 1913 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner German, 1880-1938 Oil on canvas 59-1/2 x 47-1/2 in. (151.1 x 120.7 cm) Norton Simon Art Foundation M.1994.1.P © (for works by E. L. Kirchner) by Ingeborg & Dr. Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer, Wichtrach/Bern On view For this scene of nudes in a landscape, Kirchner reimagined the Baltic island of Fehmarn as a lush, tropical paradise. A founding member of the German Expressionist collective Die Brücke (The Bridge), Kirchner drew inspiration for his fractured forms and brash palette from both the “primitive” nonwestern art he encountered in Germany’s anthropological museums and the Post-Impressionist French pictures recently exhibited at galleries in Berlin and Dresden. Here Kirchner’s slashing brushstrokes betray a debt to Cézanne, while green and orange flesh tones suggest the influence of Van Gogh. But the determining inspiration seems to have come from Gauguin, whose conjuring of a premodern paradise in the pictures he painted on the island of Tahiti during the 1890s encouraged Kirchner to envision the considerably less distant and exotic island of Fehmarn where the German painter spent his summer holidays as a land of “South Sea opulence.” View Provenance |
| Title: : 1 of 1 |
