A female nude crouches on a round, slightly tapered plinth. A figure that can be described as a compactly worked out ‘Figura Serpentinata’. The lower body is turned to the left, the upper body to the right, the head again to the left. The figure is characterized by strongly bent legs and arms pressed against the body: "Hockende" (Squatting Woman) sits on the plinth, both legs bent left and right in front of her so that her feet touch the base. The body is upright, her arms wrapped around it and the head slightly tilted to the side nestled against the raised left arm and the bent right forearm. Her right hand covers her right breast, the left arm embraces the head of hair, so that both arms embrace it parallel to the contour of hair and head.

The "Hockende" as a Recurring Motif
The sculpture of this squatting female nude from the unique Gerlinger Collection measures 32.7 centimeters in height and is executed all-around, thus it corresponds to the spatiality and corporality that Rudolf Belling demands of a sculptural work. It was made in Dresden, where it was placed on a high tree-trunk pedestal in the Brücke studio. Kirchner then took it with him to Berlin, where he used it as a staffage figure in many works, among them the drawing "Akt vor Spiegel, in Tub steigend", which is also offered in this auction. The distinctive head of hair identifies the sculpture as a representation of Kirchner's Dresden partner Dodo, who inspired Kirchner to numerous works. The sculpture still shows remains of painting: details such as hair, head contour, as well as eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth, fingers, breasts and pubic area are highlighted in dark colors, and the plinth is also colored. Our figure is particularly distinguished by the fact that the paint is so well preserved. As far as the surface design is concerned, the artist's hand found a direct expression, it shows precise traces from the process of creation, testifying to its creator’s physical power. Each cut is traceable. The figure is roughly carved out of the wood, does not exhibit a "dead form", thus does not include hollow spaces, as Rudolf Belling demanded of a sculpture, but is carved out of the trunk as a compact form. What Kirchner saw in the trunk, what figure he had in mind and cut out of the it, is well documented in a drawing he made n 1913: "Skizze zu Skulptur," pencil and chalks, 48.5 x 38 cm, Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Henze illu. 141.

The Design of Living and Working Space as a Gesamtkunstwerk
In his studio on Berliner Strasse 80 in Dresden, Kirchner created his first living and working space according to the ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk: the walls adorned with paintings and and textiles made according to his designs, cushions, tablecloths, and the sofa; even carved sculptures, furnishings, and objects of utility were placed on tables and pedestals or were distributed throughout the room. Everything served as staffage in an artwork (Hanna Strzoda provides a detailed description and examination of Kirchner's studios in "Die Ateliers Ernst Ludwig Kirchners – Eine Studie zur Rezeption 'primitiver' europäischer und außerereuropäischer Kulturen," Petersberg 2006). Paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints and photographs by Kirchner show these self-made wooden objects behind, next to, and around the pictures’ protagonists, inspiriting fore- and background. That was where artists of the "Brücke" met and worked on the incunabula of German Expressionism. It was an environment that was considered "natural" and "original," and which also incorporated artifacts of the "primitives." This resulted in an interaction: figure became sculpture and vice versa.

The "Hockende" as an Ideal Expression
The sculpture described here shows the "Hockende" (Squatting). It is not the representation of a female nude in a crouched bearing, but the hieroglyph of "squatting" par excellence, as Kirchner himself described it under his pseudonym "Louis de Marsalle" in his essay on the sculptural works of E. L. Kirchner. It is carved out of a log to which the contours perfectly correspond: In this work Kirchner tried to carve as little as possible out of the cylindrical form. Following the hierarchical perspective, legs and arms are emphasized, defining and shaping the sculpture in a wavy S-shaped line. A figure created from aligned geometric figures, as described by Luis de Marsalle aka Ernst Ludwig Kirchner himself. In our case, it is mainly ovoid shapes that make up the sculpture.

The present figure also meets the postulations of the "Brücke" program. Of the 140 works that Wolfgang Henze identified in the catalog raisonné of Kirchner's sculpture (Wolfgang Henze, Die Plastik Ernst Ludwig Kirchners – Monographie mit Werkverzeichnis, Wichtrach/Bern, 2002), more than half of the works created during the Dresden and Berlin periods depict female nudes. As one of Kirchner’s favorite motifs, the artist found his very own expression in it and it enabled Kirchner to implement the "Brücke" principle of exaggerated form, color and gesture. The earliest works were not directly influenced by Oceanic and African art; it was not until around 1909/10 that their impact on the sculpture of the "Brücke" artists became noticeable. Thus the exaggeration of form and color was already formative for their art before that.

Kirchner's Modification of Sculpture
The so-called “Viertelstundenakt“ (Quarter Hour Nude), which the "Brücke" artists conceived in 1906, would also give distinction to sculptural works, which were peeled and milled out of the wood in rapid movements. The surface remained very rough and edged and still showed the artist’s signature. The work steps remained visible in the sculpture, each change left a trace in the material. Each sculpture shows the profile of the original log it was created from, as well as the individual work processes the artist performed on the wood. The coloring that was applied on it highlights the artist's interaction with the material, reinforces it instead of masking it. Contours were emphasized and surfaces were delineated from one another in strong contrasts. With this sculpture Kirchner created something new that art had never seen before. He as a peintre-sculpteur, as an autodidact, was able to break free from the prevailing academic constraints. Echoes of early Gothic and Renaissance pasts are more apparent than the stylistic dogmas prevalent around him. The compact posture and the painting are more reminiscent of medieval works, while the twisted body hints at the Renaissance Figura Serpentinata.

The Impressive Fusion of Painting and Sculpture
Sculpture took on an important and decisive role in Kirchner's oeuvre, developing beyond a mere concomitant phenomenon to become an independent and influential genre. The interactions between sculpture and the other genres alone show how important the sculptural works were for painting, drawing, and graphic art: The more intensively Kirchner dealt with carving figures and objects, the more sculptural his two-dimensional figures became. The faces in his paintings, drawings, and prints now appear almost mask-like. The bodies appear angular and compact. Exaggerated in their form and movement, with disproportionate features such as head, arms, legs and buttocks, breasts and genitals. In the position they were captured in, with unnaturally twisted joints, they seem so odd that the posture could hardly be a realistic one. We encounter a form of hierarchical proportion common in medieval painting, everything is subordinate to the will of the artist to represent something specific. Thus sculpting is on an equal footing with the other genres in Kirchner's work, which can be seen in the widespread and effective juxtaposition between sculptures and models in his depictions. In Kirchner's works, representations of sculptural figures appear on par with representations of living models; they inspire one another. Particularly noteworthy is the colorful setting that Kirchner gave his sculptures: quite in contrast to the traditional sculpture he knew from past centuries, which mainly showed the surface of the material unpainted, Kirchner painted his plastic works, so that they also appeared expressive in color. Kirchner used the sculpture like an image carrier and colored the surface like a painting.

Alexandra Henze Triebold