Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's frescoes: The bathers from the Taunus

Expressionism has left many fascinating works on canvas and paper, but hardly any wall paintings.

The monumental painting, which requires a lot of preparation time and a certain statistic of representation, seems to be too contrary to the quickly thrown quarter-hour-files, which the Expressionists loved.

But there are no rules without exception: in the Angermuseum Erfurt, Erich Heckel painted an entire room with “stages of life” between 1922 and 1924.

The largest wall painting program of Expressionism, however, featured five tall rectangular paintings of bathers in the so-called fountain tower of the Dr.

Kohnstamm in Koenigstein im Taunus.

Nobody less than the Brücke founder Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had frescoed the walls of this sanatorium architecture in 1916.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

• Follow I follow

He was not the only illustrious patient of the neurologist and art theorist Oskar Kohnstamm - Henry van de Velde and Carl Sternheim were also treated in Königstein, including with Kneipp cures, which is where the eponymous fountain in the painted “tower” comes from.

Kirchner but had come to the Hessian sanatorium because he mentally not coped with military service, and created as a patient there in the third year of the war in memory of happy times Fehmarn a monumental

running series of paintings of bathers.

During the National Socialist era, these wall paintings were whitewashed as ostracized art and thus largely destroyed. In 1938 the sanatorium Dr. Kohnstamm. Despite elaborate restoration attempts in the nineties, today's faded impression of the frescoes no longer even offers a pale reflection of their original appearance, as the outstanding feature of this Kirchner cycle was the outstanding luminosity of the sea around the bathers and the sky above them.

But how do you want to know something about the original color, if only black and white photos of today's almost colorless frescoes have survived? The restorers had already noticed in their investigations that Kirchner used ultramarine, the brightest blue in art made from mineral lapis lazuli, for the strikingly deep blue with which he painted both the water and the sky around the white-painted "ceiling dome" of the fountain house.

Above all, however, Kirchner's birthplace in Aschaffenburg, which miraculously survived the war and decades of disregard by the city, is now exhibiting the only originals of the destroyed Königstein frescos for the first time. Immediately to the left of the entrance, one discovers a well-preserved watercolor that Kirchner created of the “Fountain Tower” with the wall paintings (which were later partly changed). The owner from Northern Germany, who came from a great Hamburg shipowner dynasty, was immediately ready to lend it to Aschaffenburg. Glass slides from the Hamburg Museum of Art and Industry, which despite their age, have retained the central shades of blue in astonishing color fidelity, have also emerged from oblivion. They show: After Kirchner also deprived the last two clothed people (a couple walking on the beach) of the fabrics,there were only naked people on the frescoes - a four-tone color combination of orange against deep blue with background green and the white of the sail triangles on two panels. On the other hand, symbolically snow-white, a seagull like Picasso's pigeon crosses the azure and the heads of the three bathers on the front wall.

The trained architect Kirchner even made a folding model

Under the captivating fountain tower watercolor, however, there is a foldable model of the room on gray cardboard, also made by Kirchner himself, in a showcase measuring 29 by 98 centimeters with glued-in photos of the mural designs. Kirchner's handwritten notes on the colors can also be found on this leporello, but the precision of the drawn wall structure with its panels and double pilasters reveals the trained architects in particular. The lender of this object, which has never been shown in an exhibition before, the Expressionist collector Eberhard Kornfeld, was also happy to give the large and fragile treasure to Aschaffenburg. The fourth treasure is a color lithograph from the Städel,which reproduces the exact reverse motif of the painted over-door from the fountain tower in Königstein and how the painting cycle was created in 1916. For the first time, Kirchner's key work can be completely reconstructed.