Fränzi in front of Carved Chair

In 1961 Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, whose collection fills this museum, was still buying almost nothing but Old Masters, as his father had. That spring, at an auction run by the Stuttgart dealer Roman Norbert Ketterer, he fought hard for a watercolour of a young couple by the Expressionist Emil Nolde, his first purchase of 20th-century art. Ketterer soon offered him two Kirchner paintings from his own stock, and this was one of them.

For decades the girl was known only as Fränzi. In 1995 the Kirchner scholar Gerd Presler found the surname Fehrmann in one of the painter's sketchbooks, and she was traced as Lina Franziska Fehrmann, a working-class child born in Dresden in 1900. Here she is about ten, her face painted an acid yellow-green, a big blue bead necklace on her chest. Behind her rises the black back of a chair cut into the shape of a pink woman, most likely carved by Kirchner himself. Years later he wrote that in Dresden's ethnographic museum he had found carved beams from the Palau islands whose figures had exactly the same formal language as his own.