Head of Ludwig Schames, 1918

About the Work

The portrait of Frankfurt’s “best and most genteel” art dealer, Ludwig Schames (1852–1922), is one of those Kirchner executed in Kreuzlingen. The artist cut it on the back of the irregularly curved block of wood whose other side he had used for the “Head of a Sick Man” (Städel Museum, inv. no. 65611) . The second state of the Schames portrait was published in an edition of at least 120 – which Kirchner painstakingly printed by hand with a brayer – as the gift of the year for the “members of the Frankfurter Vereinigung für Neue Kunst”.

About the Acquisition

From 1900 onwards, the Frankfurt chemist and industrialist Carl Hagemann (1867‒1940) assembled one of the most important private collections of modern art. It included numerous paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially by members of the artist group “Die Brücke”. After Carl Hagemann died in an accident during the Second World War, the then Städel director Ernst Holzinger arranged for Hagemann’s heirs to evacuate his collection with the museum’s collection. In gratitude, the family donated almost all of the works on paper to the Städel Museum in 1948. Further donations and permanent loans as well as purchases of paintings and watercolours from the Hagemann estate helped to compensate for the losses the museum had suffered in 1937 as part of the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art” campaign. Today, the Hagemann Collection forms the core of the Städel museum’s Expressionist collection.