Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Portrait Erna Schilling (Sick Woman / Lady with Hat), 1913

Artist
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Title
Portrait Erna Schilling (Sick Woman / Lady with Hat)

Year of creation
1913

Technique and dimensions
oil on canvas, 71.5 x 60.5 cm

Year of acquisition
1989

Labeled top left: EL Kirchner | Acquired in 1998 with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

In October 1911, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner moved from the Saxon residence of Dresden to the imperial capital of Berlin. In a Tingeltangel bar he met the two sisters Erna and Gerda Schilling, who came from simple backgrounds and who appeared as nightclub dancers and occasionally engaged in prostitution. The painter took Erna out of this environment; in her he not only found his lover and the model for art, but also the long-desired "free companionship with the woman".

The portrait was created in 1913 in a situation of illness and melancholic mood by Erna Schilling, who Kirchner portrayed as a nervous, withdrawn "big city plant" in front of a wall covering in his studio: "Erna Schilling appears surrounded by a blue color form against a purple-violet background Her extravagant hat as a representative of metropolitan elegance. Sensitivity and irritability become clear through the vibrant pointed forms in yellowish flesh with violet-gray shadows. The nervous brushwork as well as the intense colors, which reveal the mature style of Kirchner's metropolitan paintings, transform this portrait into one a woman who was both self-confident and skeptically distanced from the coloristic psychogram of an expressionistic view of humanity on the eve of the First World War." (Peter-Klaus Schuster, 1992).

The psychologically haunting portrait of Erna Schilling, in which both the individual and the typical of the city woman are reflected, stands in its brittle habitus of the sitter and its coloristic delicacy in a close, preparatory connection to the two cocottes in Kirchner's coronation picture of the Berlin street scenes Potsdamer Platz , 1914 (owned by the Nationalgalerie), for which Erna and Gerda Schilling modeled.

Erna Schilling remained Kirchner's loyal, caring, unmarried partner; she died on October 4, 1945 at the age of 61 in Davos.

The portrait of Erna Schilling, which Kirchner particularly valued, was acquired in 1916 by the collector Dr. Carl Hagemann, Frankfurt am Main, directly from the artist. In 1946 it came from Hagemann's estate into the collection of Karlheinz Gabler, from whose estate it was acquired in 1989.

Roland March