Coffee Table (recto), On Fehmarn (verso)

This canvas is two paintings five years apart. The front is a coffee table Kirchner arranged and painted in his Dresden studio in 1908, when he was 28 and the Brucke group was three years old and still looking hard at the French, at Matisse's circle and at van Dongen. In 1913 he turned the canvas over and painted the Baltic island of Fehmarn on the back. He had first gone there in 1908 and returned every summer from 1912, and 1913 was the year the Brucke broke up. He worked on both sides of a canvas often enough that his museums now have to choose which face to hang. In 1937 the campaign against modern art pulled more than 600 of his works out of German public collections, and he shot himself the following year. This one was in private hands and the museum in Munster bought it in 1963.