Kunstsammlung NRW
In der Restaurierungswerkstatt: Begutachtung der Rückseite des Werkes von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Foto: Kunstsammlung
making of

“But a canvas has two sides, thank God”: on restoring a double-sided painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Der doppelte Kirchner. Die zwei Seiten der Leinwand  / The Double Kirchner: The Two Sides of the Canvas is the title of an exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle which closes on May 31, 2015, and is devoted to the phenomenon of double-sided paintings on canvas by the Expressionist Brücke artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Showcased are altogether 16 works, all of them displayed to show not just their front sides, but there rears as well. Among them is a masterwork owned by the Kunstsammlung.

The conservator Anne Skaliks reports to #32 about a work’s elaborate travel preparations.

 

Thanks to an early move to Switzerland in 1917, the greater part of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s artistic oeuvre has survived intact. Known today are 1045 works, among them 138 canvases that were painted by Kirchner on both sides. If we inquire into the reason for this procedure, and do a bit of reading, we quickly encounter the following statement, drawn from one of the artist’s letters of 1919: "Now I too must economize somewhat, and materials have grown quite expensive. But a canvas has two sides, thank God.”

One of these exceptional paintings, Kirchner’s Two Women on the Street (1914), has been owned by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen since 1981: since its execution, the street view has been the main side. The side regarded today as the rear, which bears the title (Two) Bathing Women in the Waves, was produced in 1912. The Bathers is hence the earlier picture, but was presumably never exhibited, and has received little attention historically.

 

 

Prehistory: earlier conservation measures

An inadvertent consequence of the intended effect of Kirchner’s painting technique, which aimed toward matte, luminous, almost pastel-like tones, is a very sensitive surface with fragile layers. The combination of a painting’s often eventful history and well-intended – but from today's perspective inadvisable – interventions has led in many cases to extensive damage. For our Düsseldorf painting, one such intervention consisted in the removal of the original stretcher frame and its stretching onto a new one. In the process, the primer and painted layers along the edges of the picture were overstretched, which led to countless cracks and the detachment and flaking of paint patches – causing clearly visible damage to the front of the painting. Unfortunately, we do not know who carried out this procedure or when – clearly, it occurred prior to its entry into the collection.

A closer look at the bathing women

After committing our work to the special presentation in Mannheim, and later in Davos, it became necessary to investigate the bathing women on the rear side of the painting more closely. A view through the microscope revealed a quite different yet far more subtle type of damage than that found on the front: the damaged areas are inconspicuous, with areas of paint becoming detached and cracking on the micro-scale. In addition, this “pattern” strongly suggested that – as we had observed already with other works – the work had been stored for a period of time unstretched, and had even suffered from creasing. This appears quite plausible when one reads that as a rule, Kirchner painted his canvases unstretched and rolled them up before having them transported!

Given the tiny dimensions of the damaged areas, stabilization had to be carried out under a microscope – only in this way is it possible to really see what one is doing, and whether the desired stabilization has actually been achieved. At isolated points, a strongly diluted adhesive material – in this instance a synthetic resin tested and then further developed especially for conservation purposes. Stabilization tests revealed that the adhesive material had soaked in well and left no shiny patches on the matte surface. The priming coat was strengthened, and the tiny paint flakes could then be painstakingly repositioned and fixed into place.

Question regarding the presentation: what did the artist want?

But now, back to “double-sidedness” and approaches to dealing with it: under development while this stabilization work was being carried out in the conservation department was a concept for displaying these works with both sides visible – a window frame structure on the back that matches the (probably original) ornamental frame of the front in terms of color and shape, and of course high-quality museum glass to adequately protect the Bathers.

How was this work conceived originally? Could intermittent financial necessity or material shortages really have been the sole motivation for using a picture support twice? Finally, the re-stretching of the canvas is necessarily associated with a certain degree of damage to the original work.

Today, it seems clear that Kirchner – who consistently edited his oeuvre in a critical spirit – found sufficient numbers of earlier pictures that in retrospect did not seem to him worth preserving – all the more so when they could be reused for the sake of new works. In many instances, he let this be known by overwriting the discarded painting with the title of the new work found on the new front side; in a few cases he even repainted the entire surface with white distemper. He also altered formats and/or orientations, thereby decisively excluding the possibility of a two-sided presentation.

Newly discovered during the restoration was a network of red lines that are broadly interpretable as ‘crossing out’ lines executed by the artist – which would be consistent with the above-mentioned method of rendering earlier works invalid. Moreover, the earlier painting was probably never finished: Kirchner built up his compositions in two phases: an initial application involving strongly diluted oil paint was followed by a working out phase involving more solid colors and luminous accents. This concluding phase seems never to have been carried out on the Bathers.

The evidence, then, indicates quite clearly that the artist discarded the original work. Strictly speaking, then, would it not violate his wishes to display both sides of the work on a permanent basis?


From Mannheim back to Düsseldorf

When the exhibition in Mannheim and Davos concludes, our painting will return to the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf. Here, it will take its customary place at the K20. Regarding the question of the work’s ‘correct’ presentation, an interest in unusual and historical aspects stands opposed to the artist's own decision and our respect his wishes. For this reason, our work will hang ‘obediently’ on the wall again after its ‘two-faced’ exhibition tour, and the Two Women will look out at us from the street – a shame perhaps for the Bathers, but a consequential decision that takes into account the work’s genesis and its integrity.


The painting conservator Anne Skaliks, who summarized the various restoration phases for #32, will not be deprived of the opportunity to accompany the Kirchner work to Mannheim. She strongly recommends the exhibition catalog to anyone who would like to explore Kirchner’s double-sided paintings further. Readers of German can study Kirchner’s painting technique in detail in: "Aufbruch in die Farbe. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und das Neue Malen am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts." Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung, 27. Jahrgang 2013 Heft 1, Worms 2013.