Standing Female Nude

The roughly carved edges of this work call to mind both African sculpture and the enigmatic figure in the background of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier in the AMAM collection; it is also highly reminiscent of the artist's woodcuts. Kirchner had begun sculpting in wood around 1911, after studying African, Pacific Island, and Indian sculpture. The work has traditionally been dated to 1919, when Kirchner was living near Davos, Switzerland, after the trauma of the First World War.

Prior to the AMAM purchase of it, Standing Female Nude was twice exhibited in 1952 as "Eva," a reference to the biblical Eve, for the figure's unabashed nudity. Although the artist was sculpting figures of Adam and Eve for either side of a door for his home in Switzerland in 1921, and created many other works with that theme, it is not known to be original to the Oberlin sculpture. When Kirchner published the work that same year in an article he wrote under his pseudonym "L. de Marsalle," he simply titled it "Stehendes Mädchen" ("Standing Girl"). The artist's wife, Erna, likely served as model.

The sculpture's expressive pose-one shoulder hunched up, the other pushed down, with one hand on a hip and one on the chest-brings out its energy and tension, the result of fitting the figure into what was a narrow block of wood. In 1911, Kirchner had written of woodcarving that "it is so good for painting and drawing, this making of figures, it lends wholeness to drawing and is such a sensual pleasure when blow by blow the figure grows more and more from the trunk. There is a figure in every trunk, one must only peel it out."