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A stylised figure of Fränzi was used as the cover of the catalogue of the exhibition held by the Die Brücke group in the Gallery Arnold in 1910. That image was a woodcut by Heckel based on a work by Kirchner. The use of this child model as the image of the group's first important exhibition and its recurring appearance in numerous works by these young German artists between 1909 and 1911 has made Fränzi a real symbol of Expressionist art from the Dresden period.
Fränzi in front of a Carved Chair is the most powerful of all the images of this young girl and is one of the most thought provoking works of Kirchner's entire oeuvre. In this half length portrait Kirchner distances himself from traditional types of portrait painting to offer a subjective representation of the sitter. Fränzi, a child of around twelve when she was depicted, belonged to the group of youngsters in the working class neighbourhood of Friedrichstadt who visited the Expressionists and posed for them as models. Fränzi's name is usually linked to that of Marcella, another model who is often depicted at this time and who is sometimes referred to as her sister and at other times as a friend. Fränzi is shown with her hair newly arranged and has dressed herself for the occasion in a printed dress with a large necklace of blue beads. She rests against the back of a roughly caved chair (undoubtedly carved by Kirchner himself) which, like a nightmarish shadow or a doppelganger, takes on the form of a woman. As the opposite to Fränzi, the woman is naked, charged with eroticism and deliberately painted in a very realistic flesh colour.
Our attention is immediately drawn to Fränzi's face, and the way she stares directly at us. Her face is the most highly worked out part of the body, painted in an unnaturalistic way in a yellowish green with a few touches of pinks and blues and with thicker paint strokes than in the rest of the canvas. Her full lips are particularly striking, slightly open and painted in a strong red, making the whole portrait a symbol of awakening sexuality.
The formal simplification, the Expressionist distortion and the arbitrary use of colour are typical of the style of the Die Brücke painters. The application of colour in thick strokes and in large areas enclosed by black lines or next to unpainted patches of canvas to stress the two dimensional nature of the composition, reveal the influence of Matisse, as Magdalena Moeller (1996) has pointed out. In addition, the figure's frontality suggests the influence of Munch, Van Gogh, and above all, Gauguin.
The canvas also reveals the influence of primitive art which Kirchner had been studying in the Ethnographic Museum in Dresden. The decoration of Kirchner's studio, which is depicted in the background of the present painting, is also close to tribal art. The mural, painted by Kirchner with very stylised nudes against a strong green background, often appears in his works. We can also make it out in a photograph which Kirchner took of Fränzi next to a young boy in his Dresden studio, in which the girl appears lounging against some cushions on the ground and wearing a rather provocative expression. The sexual symbolism and the hedonistic eroticism which many of Kirchner's works convey -and not just those of Fränzi- can be linked to Nietzsche's defence of art as a form of sexual sublimation.
Paloma Alarcó
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