Her name is Milly. In any case, that's what Ernst Ludwig Kirchner called her when he photographed her in his Dresden studio, together with her partner Sam. In the photo, Sam is standing naked in front of a painted curtain, and Milly, also bare, bends down to pick up a piece of cloth. The studio itself is like a junk room, paintings and sculptures stand and lie around, with two wash bowls in between. It is the time shortly before Kirchner's move to Berlin in 1911. Another photo of Kirchner shows a Nelly, also in Dresden, but in the studio of Kirchner's painter friend and Brücke co-founder Erich Heckel. Nelly shows Heckel's girlfriend and later wife Sidi Riha (who was actually called Milda Frieda Georgi) a dance figure. She wears a long dress made of colored fabric and gold lamé, and like Sam and Milly, she isblack. Otherwise nothing is known about them, except that Kirchner also drew them and Heckel painted them.
Andreas Kilb
Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.
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The thesis of the "Whose Expression?"
We could know a lot more about Nelly, Milly and Sam, about black people around 1910 and their life in the German Empire, if Kirchner, Heckel and the other Expressionists had not only used them as models, but had told their stories.
Just as we would know a lot more about German colonial policy in New Guinea and the Palau Islands, if Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein on their travels there, not only for the colorful South Seas landscapes and idyllic images of the everyday life of the natives, but also for the economic reality Exploitation and foreign domination were interested.
This means that a thesis in the strict sense is not formulated in the exhibition that the Brücke Museum has taken over from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and supplemented from its own holdings. The show does not bring charges. It only places the art of German Expressionism, as is now expected in almost all creations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the “colonial context”. A similar “Transition Exhibition” is undertaking next door in the Kunsthaus Dahlem, which subjects the ethnological collection of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, whose estate forms the basis of the Brücke Museum, to a “critical questioning”.
Specifically, this means that the pictures and sculptures by Kirchner, Pechstein, Heckel, Nolde and Schmidt-Rottluff, which come together here once again in a happy abundance, are fitted into a chronology in which the Berlin Africa Conference of 1884 and the Maji Maji War of 1905 are just as important as the founding of the Brücke group of artists in the same year or its dissolution eight years later.
The wall texts, in which frowned upon terms such as “degenerate”, “primitivism”, “primitive peoples” and “Völkerschauen” are reproduced upside down, alternate with monitors on which postcolonial activists and art historians take care of the escalation that the Curators pinched.