When Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, E. L. Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff came together in the artist group "Brücke" in 1905, Germany was still one of the largest colonial powers in Europe. In the Dresden Museum of Ethnology, the young painters came across the art of foreign cultures for the first time. Both Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff examined it very intensively and creatively throughout their lives. Kirchner wrote to Erich Heckel in a letter in 1910: "The ethnological museum is open again, only a small part, but still a great pleasure, the famous bronzes from Benin, some things from the Pueblos from Mexico are still on display and some Negro sculptures" (March 31, 1910 to Erich Heckel in Berlin, quoted from: Dube-Heynig, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Postkarten an Erich Heckel, Cologne 1984, no. 30.). Although Kirchner was never able to travel to foreign countries himself, he furnished his studio with numerous exotic objects, such as oriental carpets and Japanese screens, he collected Egyptian drawings, owned individual pieces of African furniture (including a leopard stool from Cameroon) and had a great fascination for the frescoes in the Indian Ajanta Caves. His apartments and studios were personal retreats, in which he managed – more or less well – to escape from the increasingly threatening political world and from his mantally battered inner life. In his longing for the greatest possible originality, in his search for a unity of art and nature, he "fled" from the city to the Moritzburg ponds, to Fehmarn on the Baltic Sea and finally to Davos in the secluded mountains of the Swiss Alps.

In the life of the peoples of Africa, Oceania, North and South America, which were supposedly untouched by industrialization, and in their supposedly primal art and culture, Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff discovered a counterweight to bourgeois society in Germany and Europe. In them they found their ideals, a successful combination of nature and art, their stylistic goals and formal aspirations realized and confirmed. Especially in African art – Kirchner was fascinated by its otherness – he recognized a liberation from the classical ideals of beauty of his time and his own culture. In his self-carved wooden sculptures, but also in his paintings, his depictions of human bodies shows clear parallels to the aforementioned non-European art. In view of this close artistic connection between the "Brücke" artists and their non-European sources of inspiration, it is not surprising that individual African carvings – such as the wooden figure of the Baule offered here – found their way into the Hermann Gerlinger Collection. The art of the Baule belongs to the canon of African art from the Ivory Coast. The Baule sculptures are among the most sought-after objects of African art, particularly because of their naturalistic depictions and the impressive skills of the carvers. They are very elaborate and carved with great finesse. The symmetry, the precisely executed hairstyle and scarification, the half-open eyes and the introspective, contemplative posture with the hands resting on the stomach are characteristic.

The cultural zeitgeist at the beginning of the 20th century in Germany and the inspiring power that African art had on the work of the "Brücke" artists, has received a lot of attention in recent years. The current tensions between inspiration and appropriation were addressed in museum exhibitions such as "Kirchner und Nolde. Expressionismus und Kolonialismus" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and at the Brücke-Museum in Berlin (2021/2022) and alsi in the earlier exhibition "Fremde Götter. Faszination Afrika und Ozeanien" at the Leopold Museum in Vienna (2016/2017). [CH]