About this work
*Nude Combing Herself* (*Sich kämmender Akt*) is a 1913 oil painting on canvas, measuring 125 by 90 centimetres — a canvas tall and wide enough to give the figure an almost confrontational physical presence. It belongs to a celebrated category of Kirchner's work sometimes described as the "mirror nude," in which a woman is caught in an absorbed, private act of grooming. Kirchner's nudes were never the smooth, mythological goddesses of the French Salon; they are angular, raw, anatomically distorted figures painted in clashing, unnatural colors. Here, that signature language is applied to a moment of pure domesticity — a figure tending to herself, arms raised, body twisting — so that what could be a scene of quiet femininity becomes something electric and unsettled. There is an explicit erotic quality in the work, and the forms are typically harsh and jagged, the colours dissonant. The figure commands the canvas entirely; Kirchner allows no comfortable distance between subject and viewer.
1913 was not only a highly eventful year by virtue of being the last year before the First World War broke out — it was also the year the Brücke artists' group, founded in 1905, finally disbanded, at precisely the moment widely regarded today as the heyday of their form of Expressionism.
Kirchner painted *Sich kämmender Akt* in 1913, the same year the Brücke dissolved.
At the end of that year, Kirchner and Erna Schilling moved to a studio in Körnerstraße in the prosperous Berlin district of Steglitz — a space Kirchner always treated as an artwork in its own right. This painting belongs squarely to his Berlin studio period, when the figure — increasingly intimate, increasingly charged — became both subject and psychological arena. The work's subsequent provenance is equally dramatic: *Sich kämmender Akt* entered the Frankfurt collection of Rosy Fischer before being seized in July 1937 in Halle as part of the Nazi campaign against "degenerate art." It now resides in the Brücke-Museum in Berlin, one of the most authoritative institutions on Kirchner's legacy.
As wall art, this print belongs in a room that can hold tension — a high-ceilinged study, a bedroom with strong architectural bones, a living room that leans toward the spare and serious rather than the decorative. The colour palette strikes a contrast of deep blues and warm yellows, creating a moody and introspective atmosphere that responds well to indirect natural light, where the hues shift rather than shout. It speaks directly to
