Ernst Kirchner's Self Portrait (1907): hated by Nazis and now valued again.

German Expressionist Ernst Kirchner (1880-1938) painted Self-portrait as Soldier with Pipe (1907) while involved with the avant-garde Die Brücke movement that he’d recently co-founded. The first owner of the work was his cont­emporary and co-founder of Die Brücke, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Painted early in Kirchner’s career, the work was the art­ist’s first self-portrait, showing the artist and pipe painted with vib­rant brushstrokes. It marked the be­g­in­ning of a body of work that proved very sig­nificant for the art­ist. 25 oils bore the art­ist’s likeness, either his figure al­one or as part of a couple; of these paintings two thirds are held in museum col­l­ect­­ions. As an image of young confidence, The self por­t­rait off­ered an impressive insight into Kirchner’s artistic vision and showed his role as a leader among artists who came to see their life ex­per­iences as subject matter for art.

German expr­es­s­ionism emerged in Dresden in 1905 through Die Brucke, whose foun­d­ers in­cluded Kirchner and Emil Nolde, both of whom are rep­resented in Euro­pean Masters: Städel Museum. These artists developed a style that was abst­racted, dark and reflective of their psycholog­ical state. They pursued a pur­ity of form and colour, thus creating a truly German way of looking at the world.

The artists told of the emotional drama and pain of war eg George Grosz who volunt­eer­ed for army service in 1914. Then Dix, Beck­mann, Kirchner, Corinth & Marc also became soldier-artists. Kir­ch­­­ner act­ually suff­ered a break down in 1915, thus his discharge from the German Army.

Later Self-portrait was bought by Hugo Simon, a Berlin-based banker and polit­ic­ian in 1931. This important patron-collector was assemb­ling a fine art col­lection, starting with French classicism and ending with major examples of German & Austrian Express­ion­ism. Simon was a friend and benefactor to many art­ists, as well as being on Berlin’s Nation­al­gal­erie acq­uis­itions committee.

Only when facing Nazi persecution did Hugo and Gertrude Simon flee Ber­lin in 1933, travelling with the children to Nice and then to Mall­or­ca. They fin­ally settled in Paris where Simon re-est­ab­lished his bank and was active in organising the resist­ance movem­ent. They left Paris just bef­ore the German occupation in 1940, going to Marseille and on to Portugal, before emigrating to Brasil in 1941.

Simon’s extensive art collection, which included examples by Edvard Mun­ch and Camille Pissarro, was dispersed in forced sales and conf­is­cations after he left Germany. His heirs tried to recover many of the work from the collection eg a landscape painting with nude figures by another Die Brücker Max Pechstein, was taken from Simon’s Paris home and returned to his heirs only last year.

Nazi prop­aganda ensured that the notion of Un­healthy People became a common concept among the general popul­ace. It could then be easily dir­ected at intellectuals, artists, Jews, Comm­un­ists and all op­ponents of the Reich’s philos­ophy. This was very iron­ic. Germany had em­erged as a leading centre of the avant-garde in mus­ic, art, film and ar­chitect­ure, especially the Die Brucke Group: Otto Dix, Arn­old Sch­oen­berg, Kirch­ner, Kurt Weill and Fritz Lang. But the Nazis view­ed Weim­ar Culture with re­act­ion­ary disgust, partly from con­servative aesth­etic taste and partly from a plan to use culture as a prop­a­ganda tool. See what happened to The Brücke Painters in the Nazi Period.

Self-portrait with Pipe was exhibited at the major Kirchner retrosp­ective in Zurich in 1952 and later at the Carnegie Institute in Pit­tsburgh. In this era the work also appeared in a number of pub­licat­ions including Peter Selz's important survey German Expressionist Painting. It was then acquired by Texan heiress-philanth­rop­ist Anne Burnett Tandy. A major collector of modern art, Tandy was also an im­p­ortant patron, a trustee for some leading American institutions inc­luding N.Y’s Museum of Modern Art. Her collection covered works by Picasso, Mond­rian, Miró and Matisse, many of them don­ated to museums.

This work rem­ained in her collection and was sold with her estate in 1981, acquired by current owners’ family. It was last exhibited in the 2007 show Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism, held at N.Y’s Neue Galer­ie and Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam. The exhibition high­lighted van Gogh’s in­f­luence on Kirchner, who ident­ified with Van Gogh’s pers­on­al struggles.  He must have; in 1938 Kirchner committed suicide by gunshot.

Kirch­ner’s self-portrait was offered in a public auction as part of a legal agree­ment with the heirs of its or­ig­inal German Jewish owner, Hugo Simon and the U.S. based owners, who bought the work at Sotheby’s 40+ years ago in 1981. At Sotheby’s Lond­on 2022, Self-Portrait with a Pipe was expected to fetch $10-$14 million but it was passed in.

The New National Gall­ery Berlin shows C20th art: Expres­sion­ism, Cubism, Bauh­aus, Surr­eal­ism and works by Pablo Picasso, Kirch­ner, Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky. It was opened Sept 1968, sig­nalling West Ber­lin’s cul­tural rebirth. 

New York’s Neue Galerie, 86th St and 5th Ave, opened in 2001. One floor con­centrates on early C20th Vienna: painters (Gustav Klimt, Egon Sch­iele, Oskar Kokos­ch­ka etc), archit­ects (Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser etc). And one floor for German art of the same era (August Macke, Franz Marc, Erich Heckel, Kirchner, Pechstein, Emil Nolde); Bauhaus­ers (Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Sch­lemmer, Vasily Kan­d­insky); express­ionists (Otto Dix, George Grosz); and applied artists (Peter Behrens, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe).