Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Estate of the artist (until 1966)

Roman Norbert Ketterer, Lugano (acquired by 1967)

Serge Sabarsky, New York (acquired on 7 May 1968)

Estée and Joseph Lauder, New York (acquired from the above on 30 January 1969)

Transferred from the above to the present owner in 1973

Berlin, Galerie Nierendorf, E. L. Kirchner zum fünfundzwanzigsten Todestag, 1963, pl. 19, p. 25, illustrated (titled Bogenschützin (Fränzi) and dated circa 1908)

Lugano, Galerie Roman Norbert Ketterer, Moderne Kunste IV, 1967, no. 66, p. 86, illustrated (dated 1909)

Lugano, Galerie Roman Norbert Ketterer, Modern Kunst V, 1968, no. 66, p. 81, illustrated (titled Fränzi mit Bogen and dated circa 1909)

South Bend, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Art Gallery, The German Expressionists and their Contemporaries: 50 Years of Fantasy and Frenzy, 1969-70, no. 56 (dated 1909) 

New York, The Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and Its Affinities, 1976, no. 56

London, Royal Academy of Arts and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, German Art in the 20th Century, Painting and Sculpture 1905-1985, 1985-86, no. 2, p. 152, illustrated in color 

Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Figures du Moderne, 1905-1914: Dresde, Munich, Berlin: L’Expressionisme en Allemagne, 1992-93, no. 44, p. 104, illustrated in color; p. 376 (titled Fränz mit Bogen and dated circa 1910) 

New York, Neue Galerie, New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890-1940, 2004

New York, Neue Galerie, Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913, 2009

Donald E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, 1968, no. 178, p. 71; p. 291, illustrated

Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, ed. Dresdener Kunstblätter, vol. 28, no. 5, 1984, p. 148

Anne-Marie Debu-Heynig; Roman Norbert Ketterer and Wolfgang Henze, eds., Postkarten und Briefe an Erich Heckel im Altonaer Museum in Hamburg, Cologne, 1984, p. 250, illustrated; p. 251 (dated 1909/11)

Exh. Cat., Museum Schloss Moritzburg, Künstler der Brücke in Moritzburg, 1995, p. 47, note 51

Exh. Cat., Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Kirchner, Fränzi ante una silla tallada, 1910, 1996-97, figs. 12 and 33, illustrated; pp. 22-35

Serge Sabarsky, Ich, Serge Sabarsky, Vienna, 1997, p. 15, illustrated in color (titled Fränzi mit Puppe und Bogen and dated 1909/11)

Exh. Cat., Berlin, Brücke-Museum and Frankfurt, Galerie Jahrhunderthalle, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen: die Sammlung Karlheinz Gabler, 1999-2000, pp. 22, note 61, and 23-24

Hanna Strzoda, Zur Auseinandersetzung Ernst Ludwig Kirchners mit aussereuropäischer Kunst: Die Ausgestaltung der Ateliers in Dresden und Berlin, Thesis, Otto Friedrich Universität, Bamberg, 2000, no. 102, p. 64; p. 75, illustrated

Barbara Nierhoff, Das Bild der Frau. Sexualität und Körperlichkeit in der Kunst der 'Brücke’, Dissertation, University of Essen, 2004, pp. 75 and 139, illustrated

“Art: Museums and Libraries,” The New Yorker, 26 July 2004, p. 17

Frank Kammerzell, "Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ägyptsches und Koptisches," jn .t dr.w, Festschrift für Friedrich Junge, 2006, p. 373

Hanna Strzoda, Die Ateliers Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—Eine Studie zur Rezeption "primitiver" europäischer und aussereuropäischer Kulturen, Petersberg, 2006, p. 124, footnote no. 941; p. 125; p. 124, illustrated; p. 158, illustrated in color

Magdalena M. Moeller, “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—Fränzi vor geschnitztem Stuhl,” Neue Forschungen und Berichte, Brücke-Archiv, vol. 23, 2008, pp. 110-11, illustrated

Exh. Cat., New York, Neue Galerie, Masterworks from the Neue Galerie New York, 2016-17, p. 236, illustrated in color (in installation photograph of New York, Neue Galerie, Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913, 2009)

With its dramatic interplay of vibrant, free-form color and vigorous brushwork, Fränzi mit Pfeilbogen (Fränzi with Bow and Arrow) of 1910 is an outstanding work from the height of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s involvement with the die Brücke group in Dresden. Depicting the group’s favorite model, Fränzi Fehrmann, sitting crouched and aiming a bow and arrow, the present work superbly embodies the Expressionist group’s collective aims of liberated expression.

Lina Franziska Fehrmann (Fränzi) was only eight years old in 1909, when she first began modelling for the Brücke painters Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff and Max Pechstein in their richly decorated Dresden studios, created in revolt against what they considered the absurdity of modern bourgeois metropolitan life. In the ensuing years, prior to the group’s 1911 move to Berlin, Fränzi would appear with more regularity than any other model in the artists’ paintings and drawings (see figs. 2-4). Such was Fränzi’s impact on die Brücke that many years later Erich Heckel remembered her introduction to them as “a special event.” Fränzi—the youngest of their models—most epitomized the instinctive, uncorrupted, spirit of youth, freedom and wild nature that they were all seeking to celebrate and invoke in their art: each of the Brücke painters admitted to being captivated by her “youthful innocence,” “lack of inhibition” and “natural grace” (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner quoted in Exh. Cat., Hannover, Sprengel Museum, Der Blick auf Fränzi und Marzella, 2010-11, p. 18).

As art historian Jill Lloyd explains, “children [such as Fränzi], women (of marginal, non-bourgeois status such as actresses, dancers, circus artists)...were [the group’s] favorite alternatives to professional models because they embodied [the group’s] essentially romantic, Nietzschean quest for an unverfalscht or a genuine, instinctive, and authentic counter image to the decadence of modern civilization. Kirchner’s vitalist nudes and depictions of “free Eros” are thus situated in “alternative” locations, outside the constraints of bourgeois society: either in the bohemian studio or in the natural setting of the Moritzburg Lakes which was a centre at the time for the Dresden Freikorperkultur groups, nudists who sought to escape the purportedly artificial civilization of the city” (Annick Haldemann, ed., Rethinking Kirchner, Davos, 2018, p. 152) (see fig. 1).

Painted both on these summer trips to the lakes at Moritzburg and in their studios, where they sought equally to recreate the atmosphere of a utopian paradise, Fränzi Fehrmann served as a pictorial icon of their ideals. This was, in part, due to the manner in which the young girl unselfconsciously posed and naturally, yet idiosyncratically, moved. Highly attentive to movement as an essential energizing factor of his work, Kirchner “experienced in Fränzi,” what he noted as, “something entirely new [that prompted] the study of movement ...from which I derived my own formal language” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Hannover, Sprengel Museum, Der Blick auf Fränzi und Marzella, 2010-11, p. 18). Frequently making spontaneous sketches of her, Kirchner began to combine the model girl and her actions into compositions works akin to a that portray performance, staged amidst the colorful backdrop of his studio and Fränzi less as a figure than as an event, as is articulated by the energized fields of color, vibratory field that surrounds her dynamically posed form in the present work.

“We pounced onto nature as we found it in the girls,” Kirchner said about painting Fränzi and other young models (quoted in Ulrike Lorenz, Die Brücke, Cologne, 2008, p. 46). Often working collectively in one another’s studios, it was raw expression—an instinctive, spontaneous painterly response to the sensations and impulses found in what they saw before them—that was more important to the Brücke collective’s work at this time than any planned conception of a finished result.

“We were just working for the sake of working,” Erich Heckel recalled, “That the optical result was also powerful was not necessarily our intention, it was something that came out of the laws governing the way in which we were working. With regards to the external conditions—landscape, people, fluidity—all this stimulated the eye for color and contributed to a pictorial vision that ran counter to that of the Impressionists and concentrated on the essential elements of picture-making—things more important than just the motif, the viewpoint or the momentary conditions” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Badenden Mensch und Natur im deutschen Expressionismus, 2000, p. 36).

Kirchner’s studio at this time was, as Gustav Schiefler remarked of a 1910 visit, “a narrow shop [in a Dresden suburb] which had a large glass window to the street and a small adjacent space that served as a bedroom. These rooms were fantastically decorated with colored textiles which he had made using the batik technique; with all sorts of exotic equipment and wood carvings by his own hand. A primitive setting, born of necessity but nevertheless strongly marked by his own taste. He lived a disorderly lifestyle here according to bourgeois standards, simple in material terms, but highly ambitious in his artistic sensitivity. He worked feverishly, without noticing the time of day... everyone that comes into contact with him, must respond with strong interest to this total commitment to his work and derive from it a concept of the true artist” (Gustav Schack, ed. Postkarten an Gustav Schiefler, Hamburg, 1976, p. 80) (see fig. 5).

In Fränzi mit Pfeilbogen, Kirchner depicts Fränzi in the studio playfully crouching amidst this colorful, fantastic world in a manner that echoes his Moritzburg open-air paintings (see fig. 6). Fränzi’s uninhibited nature and the defining impact they had on Kirchner are all typified in this painting by the way in which pose, action, color, form and setting have all been integrated into one raw, spontaneous painterly celebration made directly from life. Fränzi’s role in this painting—as a kind of young Amazon, playfully shooting a bow and arrow and giving life to the imagined setting within which she is placed—also stands as a symbol of the aims of die Brücke: the intention to revitalize modern life through art.

Indeed, this image of the naked young girl with a bow and arrow was to become an icon of die Brücke’s aims when it was taken up by Max Pechstein in his 1910 poster for the group’s initiation of a Neue Secession and where it was interpreted powerfully as a symbol of ‘the mutiny of primitive, raw art instincts against civilization, culture and taste in art” (Erich Vogeler, “Die Neue Secession,” Kunstwart, no. 23, 1909-10, p. 314) (see fig. 7).

Thought to be associated with the tribal cultures uncorrupted by the forces of contemporary civilization, bows and arrows were wielded by the die Brücke painters as evocative props that promoted their atavistic ideals. In Moritzburg, and also within the confines of their studios, they would reportedly practice archery, seeing in it a fundamental link with an idyllic prelapsarian world of the past. A letter from Kirchner to Heckel from this time reads: “Tell me, how does archery actually work? You don’t even write about it. I’ve converted a standing bow into a crossbow and exploited the tension to the utmost. [It] works brilliantly with arrows of the same construction: brass tube, iron, and maple shaft... I have 17 bow arrows and 18 for the crossbow” (undated letter from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to Erich Heckel, published in Exh. Cat., Museum Schloss Moritzburg, Künstlergruppe Der Brücke in Moritzburg, 1995, p. 47). Archery thus formed part of a holistic vision of a harmonious world in which these artists’ paintings, sculptures and spaces were intertwined with nature: through visceral brushwork, heightened color, spontaneous impulse and raw action, it was the purpose of their art and lives to fuse into one reflection and articulation of this vision.

As Fränzi mit Pfeilbogen evinces, models—even those as young as Fränzi— were vital creative partners in this enterprise. “The path of development in these external things,” Kirchner once wrote, “from the first appliqué ceiling in the first Dresden studio to the perfectly harmonious space in each of our Berlin studios, is an uninterrupted logical progression, which went hand-in-hand with the painterly developments of the pictures, the graphics and the sculpture… The love that the painter showed the girl who was his partner and helper washed over onto the carved figure, was ennobled by the environment as it was transferred to the image, and in its turn conveyed the particular form of the chair or table from its basis in the lifestyle of the human exemplar. That is a simple example of the road to the creation of art. That was the Brücke’s view of art” (quoted in Ulrike Lorenz, Die Brücke, Cologne, 2008, pp. 10-11).