Ballerine di czardas

Kirchner began this in Dresden in 1908, three years after he and three fellow architecture students founded the Brücke there. Hungarian dance troupes were touring the German variety halls at the time, and the czardas they performed is in fact a fairly serious, restrained folk dance. Very little of that survives on this canvas. Then the picture waited. Kirchner volunteered in 1915, broke down within months, was discharged, and ended up in the Swiss mountains at Davos. In 1920 he took the old canvas up again and put bright colour into the background areas he had left bare 12 years earlier. The museum in The Hague catalogues it under both dates, a first state of 1908 and a second of 1920.