Seated Woman in the Studio

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a founder and the de facto leader of Die Brücke (The Bridge), one of Germany’s first and ultimately most influential associations of progressive artists. The members hungered for new artistic inspiration, which they found in works by foreigners, especially Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Henri Matisse. When drawing Seated Woman in the Studio, Kirchner was fresh from seeing the products of Matisse’s Fauve (wild animal) period. Though conservative critics found the result “half barbaric, half refined, ” a more sympathetic commentator singled out Kirchner as making the greatest contribution to the expression of Brücke principles, “the wish for a picture based on nature, but only as material for a (more or less consciously) simplified and constructed synthesis.”