Two Girls / Naked GirlsTalking

Naked Girls Talking – was what the artist wrote on the back of the painting, which also shows an incomplete landscape painting. The young girls’ postures point to their insecurity. Presumably it is the first encounter between Marcella and Senta in the Dresden Brücke atelier, which Kirchner painted here; both girls became a frequent motif of the Brücke artists (1905–13). The immediacy of the depiction is a central element of the group’s approach to painting, which in Dresden 1905–11 propagated the representation of spontaneous expression in art above all by portraying nudes in nature. A new manner of painting emerged from their admiration for the formal language of primitive sculpture outside of Europe, for old German wood engraving, and for the liberation of colour in Fauvism. Accordingly, this painting is also characterized by a great simplification of the shapes, the rapid application of pure, glowing colours in broad areas and the expressive, accentuating black of the contours. (Sophia Stang)