EXPRESSIVE!
The Nude in Modern & Contemporary Art

After a whole century, the important painting Vom Berge steigende nackte Frau (Erna) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner will be on display exclusively at TEFAF 2024 for the first time since 1922.

The artwork was last shown in 1922 at the Kunstsalon Schames in Frankfurt on the occasion 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 Rising from the Mountain (Erna)
stretched on a new stretcher.

The work shows Erna Kirchner in a Davos landscape, when Kirchner painted bathing scenes in nature for the first time again after a visit to Davos by the dancer Nina Hard in 1921. This is an important moment in Kirchner's work, linking the Davos period with the motifs of the early Brücke years.

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

In abstraction, too, there was a confrontation with nude. Karl Hartung worked in a "field of tension" between non-representational form and the reproduction of reality, in which he explored the various possibilities of abstraction.

The first abstract sculpture was created as early as 1935, but more or less representational depictions can still be found in his work to the end. Depictions of reduced human figures and animals as well as amorphous forms provide an insight into the artist's working methods, who constantly questioned himself and his work and frequently revisited and re-examined 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, which were triggered by the sight of a squeezed out and strangely deformed, figurative-looking tube of paint in the painting studio, are still part of his artwork today. The found object can be seen as a further development of the ready-made. Over the years, he has continued to develop the use of the tube figure. In 1965, for example, he created the first figure boxes, which are box-like works containing various tube figures. From 1972, the artist created figures in a larger format by shaping the figures out of lead and thus no longer being bound to the prescribed tube size.

The "tube figures" have been used and further developed again and again since then, mostly creating female bodies that penetrate the space. The figures are formed in human size from lead, like the work "Lead Figure".

Giovanni Manfredini
- Full body prints

Characteristic of the figurative depictions are negative prints of individual body parts or the entire body, which have enlivened the artist's work since 1995. The examination of fire and his own body is closely linked to the severe burns Manfredini suffered as a child.

Rather than using traditional painting tools such as brushes and paint, chalk, charcoal or pencil, Manfredini pressed his chest, arms, legs and face against the soot-covered surfaces and rolled them off in order 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 freed from the dark particles by whole body prints or parts of it. Under the darkness, the bright light reappears. Manfredini presses the face, torso, arms, hands and legs onto the blackened surface and creates a "negative impression" that has become so typical of his work.

After further reworking, usually with fingers but also with real brushes, the works are heavily varnished, which ensures their preservation and conservation.