Ego under the hammer
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Self-Portrait with Pipe”, 1907
Quelle: Courtesy Sotheby’s London
With his first self-portrait, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made it clear what place he wanted to take in art. Now the expressionist masterpiece came up for auction – and was knocked down at an unexpectedly low price.
Mann with pipe and hat. Could be a gardener or a winemaker. But he is a painter. Or more precisely: a homage to a painter. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the style of Vincent van Gogh. It is his first painted self-portrait. There have been a few graphic studies of his character head before. But with such an expressive green-blue floret, the artist’s complexion really makes a difference.
The programmatic proclamation of the artists’ group “Brücke”, formed by the four Dresden architecture students Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, was two years ago. Now, in 1907, there was every reason to appear self-confident, to join the gallery of contemporary artist heroes.
Especially since the young gentlemen wanted to take the big risk of “freedom and freedom of life” in their self-empowerment for art in a world of “well-established older powers”, as they had promised in their resounding manifesto. In fact, the quartet was concerned with claiming a freedom and asserting an independence that appears just as radical as the artistic means in which freedom and independence are supposed to be symbolized.
The Dresden epoch in particular, that short, intensive time from the founding to the dissolution of the “Brücke” in 1912/13, is characterized by the expressions of uncompromising immediacy in life, especially in the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. And even if some revolutionary gestures should soon become rigid in style, then the impetuosity of line and color mixes with the anti-bourgeois dynamic, in which not only artistic careers were prepared, but also the nude sessions with the underage nude models were enjoyed.
Kirchner’s Vincent van Gogh phase didn’t last long, but it was more intense than with his friends. In November 1905, the active Dresden gallery Ernst Arnold showed over 50 paintings by the painter, who had died just 15 years earlier, in a large exhibition. Among other things, one of his self-portraits with a pipe and a straw hat. It must have made a great impression with its lightness of colour. And the tragedy of the artist’s existence that it expresses did not go badly with the self-image of the “Brücke”, which could only see its art as resistance to a narrow-minded environment.
Of course, nothing remains of Vincent van Gogh’s deeply depressive self-reflection. The painter Kirchner, who could also be a gardener or winegrower, looks out of his picture with self-confidence and self-satisfaction. And as we know him, it was inevitable that he and his “Brücke” comrades-in-arms later denied any Van Gogh influence. “During the time when we were making our forays into new areas of painting,” remembered the aged Erich Heckel, “we really didn’t see any of the ‘Fauves’ paintings.”
And Karl Schmidt-Rottluff jumps in solicitously: “At the time that the ‘Brücke’ was founded, we had precious little idea what was going on in France and elsewhere…”. And Ernst Ludwig Kirchner became downright angry when asked about his early orientation. With his imaginary critic, under whose name Louis de Marsalle he has published insightful texts about his own work, he hopes to be able to prove “that my work arose independently and purely from contemporary French art”.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Self-Portrait with Pipe”, 1907
Quelle: Courtesy Sotheby’s London
In the catalog raisonné of Kirchner-Kunst, the colleague Karl Schmidt-Rottluff is given as the first owner of the painting “Mann mit Pipe und Hat”. The picture later turns up in the collection of Hugo Simon, a private banker in the Weimar Republic who fled Berlin in 1933 and helped organize the resistance movement in Paris. The self-portrait must have come to the United States of America during this period. In 1968, catalog author Donald Gordon listed the then current owner as “Ms. Robert Windfohr, Fort Worth”. According to research by the auction house Sotheby’s, the painting from Kirchner’s early work was last on the market in 1981.
Now it was offered under the title “Self-Portrait with Pipe” at the auction house Sotheby’s in London. Called at £5m, the hammer fell at £5.8m, not even close to the lower estimate. Estimated at eight to twelve million pounds, the picture probably went below the limit.