Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Two girls under a parasol, 1910 by Atelier Liesjes

About "Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Two girls under a parasol, 1910"

by Atelier Liesjes

About the artwork

Two nude women, painted in bright coral peach and bubble gum pink, stand under a red umbrella in a landscape in this stylised, vertical painting. The scene is painted with areas of flat or striped colour with visible brushstrokes throughout. The women and umbrella take up most of the image. The woman on our left faces us naked and almost in profile. Her skin is bright peach. Red stripes outline her breasts, groin and legs. Her hair, eyes and eyebrows are painted with black stripes. She stands on one leg and stretches the other in front of her to overlap the other woman's distant foot. The first woman hooks her arm through the elbow of the other, who is facing us on our right. This second woman is also naked and has bright pink skin that is also outlined in red. Her face is a darker shade of pink, resembling a mask, and her eyes are parallel stripes of black and blue. Her left arm, on our right, hangs at her side and she holds the umbrella with her other arm. She wears a hat or her hair is dyed with alternating bands of black, red and brown, and there is a red flower or bow on one side. Black lines in the candy-red umbrella suggest a rib at the bottom and handle. Cobalt blue branches of a tree above the women have blue and green leaves. The landscape behind them consists of bands of acid green, yellow, saturated blue and cool green.

Their entire bodies are depicted bare, making the artwork a nude portrait.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Aschaffenburg, 6 May 1880 - Davos, 15 June 1938) was the most important representative of German expressionism and is considered by many to be the foreman of Die Brücke (the Bridge), an artists' collective that was active from 1905 to 1913 and later disintegrated.