Two Girls Bathing, 1913

About the Work

Kirchner once remarked that movement is the key to “human sensibility and visual experience”. It is also the subject of this woodcut. Here nature has been reduced to an abstract ornament that in a sense dictates the beat for the rhythmically moving bodies. For “Two Girls Bathing”, the artist coloured the wooden block partially in black and partially in red. Often employed by Kirchner, this is a method that produces only unique prints (monotypes).

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.