The Russian Woman

In 1932 this painting travelled north with a touring show of recent German art, hanging in Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Malmö and Copenhagen before the tour closed in Cologne. It then belonged to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Magdeburg. On 18 August 1937 it was confiscated from that museum as so-called degenerate art and passed to the Berlin dealer Ferdinand Möller. Kirchner had painted it in 1912, his first full year in Berlin, signing it at the lower right and writing the title, Die Russin, on the back. Who the Russian woman was is not recorded. She stands full length in a blue coat, between a red armchair and a patterned carpet. In 1947 the Berlin gallery of Gerd Rosen, open since the summer of 1945, arranged its return to a public collection in Cologne, the modern pictures the lawyer Josef Haubrich had given the city. It moved to the Museum Ludwig in 1976.