Ragazza con gonna rossa

In 1910 Adolf Erbsloh was one of the painters in the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen, the Munich group whose quarrels would soon split off into the Blue Rider around Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This is one of the new pictures he made that year: a young woman half undressed, arranging her hair, a long skirt of flat, forceful red filling the lower half of the canvas. Here colour has largely stopped describing objects and begun carrying the feeling itself, which is just what these painters were reaching for. Franz Marc singled this canvas out for praise the same year. The Wuppertal museum bought it in 1949 and has kept it since.