Into the Night

In September 1910 the New Artists' Association of Munich, the society Werefkin had helped to found the year before, opened its second exhibition at the Thannhauser gallery. She showed six pictures. Of the 115 works on view only a handful were reproduced in the catalogue, and this was one of them. It is among the largest paintings she made, about a metre wide. The scene is a lane at night after an open-air performance. Plain benches for the audience stand empty in front, a makeshift cloth for a stage is stretched in the left corner, and two actors are still there in costume, a king in a red cloak pressing on the figure before him. Three silent women stand in doorways. From 1969 to 2013 the picture stayed in the same private collection, and when the Lenbachhaus looked for it in 1999 for an exhibition, it could not be traced. The museum's friends' association bought it in 2018, to mark its own 25th anniversary.