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Audio Stop 14

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Two nude women, painted in vibrant coral peach and bubblegum pink, stand under a red umbrella in a landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The scene is painted with areas of flat or streaked color with visible brushstrokes throughout. The women and umbrella take up most of the picture. The woman on our left stands facing our right almost in profile. Her skin is vivid peach. Slashes of red outline her breasts, groin, and legs. Her hair, eyes, and eyebrows are painted with black strokes. She stands on one leg and stretches the other in front of her to overlap the far foot of the other woman. The first woman hooks her arm through the elbow of the other, who stands facing us to our right. This second woman has vivid pink skin also outlined in red. Her face is a darker shade of pink, resembling a mask, and her eyes are parallel strokes of black and blue. Her left arm, on our right, hangs by her side, and she holds the umbrella with the other arm. She either wears a hat or her hair is painted with alternating bands of black, red, and brown, and there is a red flower or bow to one side. Black lines in the candy-red umbrella suggest a rib on the underside and the handle. Cobalt-blue branches of a tree above the women has blue and green leaves. The landscape beyond them is made up of bands of acid green, yellow, saturated blue, and cool green.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Two Girls under an Umbrella, 1910

This work dates to early in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s prolific career, when he was a founding member of the expressionist group called Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden in 1905. In this painting, Kirchner has depicted two nudes in a natural setting, rather than in the contrived space of an academic studio. This work is also an example of the artist’s use of bold, often crude, forms and vibrant color.

Read full audio transcript

HARRY COOPER:

Two women out for a stroll ... but what are they doing? [laughs] Why are they naked?

NARRATOR:

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s portrayal of these women exemplifies the style that became known as German expressionism, cofounded by Kirchner in the early years of the twentieth century. These artists filled their canvases with slashing strokes and often distorted figures rendered in high-keyed color. Kirchner and his circle emerged within a rapidly changing world: industrialization, the threat of war, social ills. They gravitated to cities like Dresden and Berlin but also embraced primitive cultures and a return to nature.

Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art, quotes Kirchner on this new approach.

HARRY COOPER:

Kirchner said: “We carry the future, and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement, against the long-established older forces. Everyone who, with directness and authenticity, conveys that which drives him to creation, belongs to us.” I think the key phrase in that quote: freedom. We really see in this painting an attempt to break out of rules and conventions, taking what would seem to be a polite subject, and stripping it— literally stripping the figures, presenting them naked in the landscape covered with this really aggressive color and texture.

NARRATOR:

If you’ll look closely here, you’ll see the woman on the right is wearing a hat, a relic of an old-fashioned way of life.

HARRY COOPER:

And so they seem to be caught, in a way, between cultures. A sort of European fantasy maybe, of what it would be like to live without a lot of the codes that we have and letting go of a lot of the trappings of civilization.

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