Technical tests on a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt have revealed a second canvas underneath. Titled Café Scene (1926), the earlier work was created eight years after bad health and mental illness had prompted the artist to leave Berlin for rural Switzerland.
The painting on top, Sleigh Trip in the Snow (1927-29), was donated to the Städel in 1987 by a Frankfurt businessman, Kurt Möllgaard. It was in Kirchner’s possession until his death and sold from his estate.
Kirchner was in the habit of stretching more than one canvas over the same frame. In a 1918 letter, he asked the collector Carl Hagemann to check with the buyers of two of his works to see whether they had other paintings underneath. “I have often had to stretch three or four canvasses over each other when I haven’t had any frames,” he wrote.
Though the Städel has a large collection of works by the Brücke group, of which Kirchner was a founding member, the museum possesses few late works by the artist. Many of the works Kirchner painted in his home near Davos in Switzerland depicted rural mountain life. Café Scene shows that he maintained his interest in urban life even after he left Berlin, where he had painted his famous street scenes.
“The newly discovered Café Scene enriches the Städel’s Expressionist collection with a painting that strikingly illustrates the stylistic changes in Kirchner’s oeuvre during the 1920s,” Philipp Demandt, who was recently appointed director of the Städel, said in a statement. Both paintings are on display in a small exhibition presenting restoration and research activities at the Städel (until March 2017).
