Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

High pine trees in front of hilly landscape
(Hohe Kiefern vor Hügellandschaft)

Standing nude in yellow and pink
(Stehender Akt in Gelb und Rosa)

1921-23
Oil in canvas
70 x 37 cm
(Backside is unfinished and overpatined)

Gordon 0720 (recto + verso)

Technically, this painting is unique because it is painted on wood. Kirchner practically always used canvas for oil painting, only in a few cases cardboard. Not unique but still as special is to be mentioned: It is painted on two sides, once in the early 1920s and the second time in the early 1930s. However, this second painting, "Standing Nude in Yellow and Pink" 1930-1932, Gordon 720 v., is in this case quite obviously unfinished and the overpainting therefore really to be classified as a warp.
‍
However, the composition is also special or unique. Spiral, tall, lanky trees have been known to art history at least since the famous "Avenue of Middelharnis" by Meindert Hobbema. Such single or in a few specimens together standing tall trees, which carry only at the very top a small crown, there are in some quantity also in the work of Ferdinand Hodler. In this case, because this composition is really a special case in Kirchner's landscape painting, we may nevertheless assume that Kirchner had Hobbema and Hodler in mind when he observed this motif in the Davos landscape and captured it for himself. After all, he had become the fourth great painter of the alpine landscape in modernism in the succession of Segantini, Giacometti and Hodler, which he knew very well. For this reason he had to devote himself to this special theme of solitary trees on tall, slender trunks. A task that he solved brilliantly and entirely in his own spirit. The taller of his two heroes even pierces the upper edge of the picture, as is usually the case with Kirchner: Kirchner's Davos landscape pure, in violent forms of green and brown tones under an equally violent blue-white sky.