Gerda and Erna (Gerda und Erna)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was arguably the greatest of the German Expressionist printmakers of Bridge (Die Brüke), the artistic association he helped found in 1905. He rarely used a professional printer since he insisted that printing by hand carried the artist into the final phase of creation and insured artistic authenticity. This lithograph, an extraordinary impression printed in viscous black ink or oil paint, depicts the nightclub dancer Erna Schilling sitting nude behind her fashionably dressed elder sister, Gera, in the artist’s Berlin studio. Kirchner worked the composition in three states, darkening in the final version the figures and background to an unusual degree of chromatic density and subtlety of tone. He risked destroying the image by using turpentine to etch the stone. In consequence, the images thickens with each state, producing a result more aligned with his woodcuts than traditional lithography.