Artistin

The painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that we present today was created in 1910. A girl sits relaxed on the sofa with a cat: she is wearing a striped top, warm socks, and slippers. It gives us the distinct impression that we are observing the girl in an everyday scene.

Like his fellow Brücke artists (Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905), Kirchner deliberately chose not to work with professional models, who often adopted artificial and stereotypical poses. But who are we actually looking at in this image? In addition, how natural is this situation really? For a long time, it was assumed that the child model depicted here was named Marcella, though there are no conclusive sources on this.

Another child model, however, is well known: Lina Franziska Fehrmann, who was born as one of twelve children to a working-class family in Dresden in 1900. Franziska was introduced to the Brücke artists in 1909, when she was just eight years old, and went on to appear in a number of works by Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Max Pechstein under her nickname, Fränzi. It is known that the Brücke group worked with various child models. The exact identity of the Artistin remains unclear to this day.

In art historical literature, it has repeatedly been stressed that the Brücke artists preferred the authenticity and ease of the child models’ poses and charisma. There is growing criticism, however, of the unequal power and gender relations between adult men aged from 20 to 30 and these very young girls.

In 2025, the Brücke-Museum in Berlin celebrates 120 years of Brücke with a major exhibition. On 7 June 1905, four young architecture students came together in Dresden to form the Brücke artists' group: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl had no artistic training, but they confidently set out to revolutionize art together. 

P.S. Read more about the art of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—one of the fathers of Expressionism!

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