EXPRESSIVE!
The Nude in Modern & Contemporary Art

After an entire century, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s significant painting *Nude Woman Descending a Mountain (Erna) * will be on view exclusively at TEFAF 2024 for the first time since 1922.

The artwork was last exhibited in 1922 at the Kunstsalon Schames in Frankfurt as part of the major Kirchner exhibition “Swiss Works by E.L. Kirchner.”

It was not until 1975 that Roman Norbert Ketterer discovered the canvas hidden behind another painting. He separated the two paintings and had *Nude Woman Ascending a Mountain (Erna) *
stretched onto a new stretcher.

The work Erna Kirchner in a Davos landscape, created in 1921 when Kirchner—following a visit to the dancer Nina Hard in Davos—returned to painting bathing scenes in nature for the first time. This marks an important moment in Kirchner’s work, linking his Davos period with the motifs of his early Brücke.

Georg Tappert
- Dancer Betty

Georg Tappert had found a preferred model for himself in his partner and dancer Betty. The Berlin painter and graphic artist was one of the founders of the "Neue Secession" in the spring of 1910. Hermann Max Pechstein, then Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff moved shortly afterwards from Dresden to Berlin, which became the center of all expressionist art before and after the First World War.

In the years 1912-1913, the voluptuous dancer Betty was his preferred model, an overwhelming experience for Tappert, which he depicted in all techniques - drawing, watercolor, woodcut, etching, lithography and photography. The series of around ten large-format paintings achieve an intensity in their depiction of the exuberant attitude to life in Berlin at the time that can only be compared with the series of street scenes - albeit with a different intention - by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

George Grosz
- Eva as wife and model

George Grosz also captured his wife Eva in a series of nudes. This series is part of an intensive and fruitful exploration of the subject during the artist's time away from Germany in America, where he had already moved in early 1933.

Grosz had been familiar with nude drawing and painting since his training: The more or less naked body, often with just a hat, stockings or shoes, often appears in the artist's earlier satirical, social and socio-critical works, among other things. The big city motifs that were so popular in Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century, such as street scenes, revues, ballets, but also fairgrounds and other places of entertainment, served as models for some of the artist's early masterpieces.

But what motivated Grosz during his stay in America to focus on the subject of nude in several hundred works on paper and paintings?

The fact that he had a patient and inspiring model at his disposal was certainly decisive: his own wife Eva, whom he met for the first time in 1918 and whom he married in 1920. Alone or together with her sister Lotte, she fired the artist's imagination and appears in a wide variety of poses indoors and outdoors, often with props or in combination with a self-portrait in drawings, watercolors, mixed media and paintings. Grosz always preferred voluptuous forms, although he certainly exaggerated them in his depictions and adapted them to his artistic ideas.

The abundance of colorful versions created in America is striking: Nude drawings were already created in Germany, but since the move to America there is a whole series of several hundred watercolors and mixed media in which special attention is paid to the elaboration of individual features, so that Eva can be clearly identified as a model.

Karl Hartung
- Amorphous forms

Even within abstraction, there was an engagement with the nude. Karl Hartung worked within a “field of tension” between non-representational form and the depiction of reality, exploring the various possibilities of abstraction.

His first abstract sculpture was created as early as 1935, yet more or less representational works work in his work right up to the end. Depictions of simplified human figures and animals, as well as amorphous forms, offer insight into the artist’s working method; he work questioned himself and his work , often revisiting and reexamining motifs.

Georg Baselitz
- Tête-á-tête

Right up to the present day, "nude" has been an attractive subject for artists. In "La nuit mit Marie", for example, Georg Baselitz presents an exposed woman and a man with his trousers down in typical "upside down" style. The technique of the black and white linocut underpins the couple's nocturnal tête-á-tête, which is illuminated by a candle placed on the woman's skirt.

Markus Lüpertz
- Man & Nature

"Et in Arcadia ego" - under this motto of longing, artists have been creating idylls of harmony between man and nature for centuries. Markus Lüpertz has also been searching for Arcadia for decades - that utopian place of perfection, freedom and immortality, the landscape that Markus Lüpertz chose for his important cycle of the same name and in which he gathered a whole series of figures from ancient mythology to bear witness to the human condition.

Jürgen Brodwolf
- Tubenfiguren

The “tube figures”—inspired by the sight of a squeezed-out, strangely deformed, figurative-looking paint tube in his studio—remain a part of his artwork to this day. This found object can be viewed as a further development of the ready-made. Over the years, he has continually refined his use of the tube figure. This led to the creation in 1965 of the first “figure boxes”—box-like works containing various tube figures. Beginning in 1972, the artist began creating larger-scale figures by casting them in lead, thereby freeing himself from the constraints of the tube’s original size.

Since then, the “tube figures” have been repeatedly used and further developed; they mostly take the form of female bodies that project into the space. The figures are cast in lead at human scale, as in the work .”

Giovanni Manfredini
- Full body prints

A defining feature of the figurative works are negative imprints of individual body parts or the entire body, which have been a central element of the work since 1995. His exploration of fire and his own body is closely linked to the severe burns Manfredini sustained during his childhood.

Instead of traditional painting tools such as brushes and paint, chalk, charcoal, or pencil, he pressed his chest, arms, legs, and face against surfaces covered in soot, rolling them along these surfaces to immortalize images of his own body—reminiscent of photographs or X-rays—either as a whole or in fragmentary form. The black layer of soot is then stripped of its dark particles through full-body impressions or parts thereof. Beneath the darkness, the bright light emerges once more. Manfredini presses his face, torso, arms, hands, and legs onto the blackened surface, creating a “negative impression” that has become work characteristic of his work .

After further refinement—usually with his fingers, but also with actual paintbrushes—the works are heavily varnished, which ensures their preservation and conservation.