Rückenakt mit Spiegel und Mann

Kirchner had been in Berlin about a year when he painted this. He arrived from Dresden at the end of 1911, opened a painting school with the painter Max Pechstein that drew almost no students, and hung his rented studio with textiles and carvings he had made himself. The woman stands with her back to us in front of a mirror, wearing nothing but reddish-brown shoes. Behind her, in dark street clothes and a top hat, a man watches her. The Brücke-Museum in Berlin, which bought the painting from a private owner in 1988, describes the room as reading like a studio and a brothel at once, settling into neither. The man never appears in the mirror. His face stays blurred and anonymous in the shadow at the back.