The Clown
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
  • Aschaffenburg 1880 - 1938 Davos
  • The Clown, 1910
  • Green chalk and brush with black ink over pencil, on a handwritten postcard
  • signed there with pencil and pen and ink: EL Kirchner und E Heckel
  • 140 × 90 mm
Provenance:
Dr. Elsa Hopf, Hamburg

The recipient of this postcard was a dentist in Hamburg and belonged to the artistically-inclined friend circle of the author Richard Dehmel and art historian Rosa Schapire. The latter probably also arranged contact with the artists’ association Die Brücke in Dresden, founded in 1905, to which Elsa Hopf soon also belonged as a passive member.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s first woodcut was sent as a postcard as early as 1904, but the other artists of the Brücke began sending drawn cards to friends and like-minded persons only in early 1909. Along with Karl Schmidt-Rotluff (1884-1976), who incidentally designed two ex libris for Elsa Hopf in 1912, Kirchner was one of the first and most eager to discover this medium for himself. Together with his artist friend Erich Heckel (1883-1970), he wrote this postcard to their mutual acquaintance in Hamburg.