Femmes buvant du café

Both sides of this canvas are painted. The coffee table came first, in 1908, when Kirchner was 28 and deep in the Dresden years of the Brucke group. Three respectable women around a laid table with the pot between them, an unusually settled subject for him, put together in the studio with the flat hot colour the group had picked up from the French. Five years later he turned the canvas over and painted the island of Fehmarn on the back, because stretched canvas cost money and these painters had very little of it. The museum in Munster bought the double-sided picture in 1963 out of a private collection, and it is the older side, the coffee table, that now hangs facing the room.