Zwei nackte Mädchen mit Blumen, 1923

About the Work

The motif of the nude moving freely in natural surroundings was one Kirchner continued to devote himself to after moving to Switzerland. Two naked girls – Erna Kirchner and the twelve-year-old Mariele – run through the forest carrying picked flowers. Soon after making this woodcut, the artist translated the figures into sculpture (“Mother and Child”, Städel Museum, inv. no. St.P443), changing them slightly in the process. Yet already in the print, the bodies appear three-dimensionally modelled by the finely cut interior lines.

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.