This wonderful scene of a self-absorbed tennis player trailed by three adoring acolytes is one of 19 etchings made between 1894 and 1896 by Eugen Kirchner, a remarkable artist who has had the misfortune of being overshadowed by a younger man with a similar name, the Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Die Tennisspieler is usually dated to 1896, but it was probably made the previous year, as the 1895 etching Dame mit Spazierstock (also known as Dame im Zimmer), incorporates the tennis player composition, showing it as a painted panel above a door.
Eugen Kirchner, Die Tennisspieler (The Tennis Player)
Etching with aquatint, 1894-1896
Eugen Kirchner was born in Halle in 1865. A founder member of the Vienna Secession, Eugen Kirchner also exhibited with the Berlin Secession, and contributed to both Pan and Die Graphischen Kunste. He had a major exhibition of drawings, watercolours and etchings in Dresden in 1904. As an etcher, he is particularly noted for his mastery of aquatint, as in Die Tennisspieler. Eugen Kirchner died in 1938.
The physicality of the man and the bundling of the women must be a deliberate element of the image. There were certainly other artists producing glamorous and even decadent images of women at the time. There's no groundinng, either; no sense of where these people are. A curious image.
ReplyDeleteWe have Kirchner's "November, 1896" from the issue of Pan bearing the same date hanging in our bedroom. Such lovely work! I see Eugen as being unfortunately caught between styles ... dabbling a little in the past and a little with the Modern. Thank you for trying to bring him out a little from Ernst Ludwig's shadow.
ReplyDeleteJane - I've been thinking about this, and I wonder if this composition was originally part of a decorative scheme (as it looks in the etching Dame mit Spazierstock), where additional background details would have detracted from the overall look. As it happens, I love the blankness of the background, because it isn't really blank, as the sheet is so loaded with aquatint. There's a delicious physicality to it that can't come across on the internet.
ReplyDeleteScott - I envy you your lovely etching from Pan! I think you're right about Eugen Kirchner, he just couldn't decide what style to follow. In my view his etchings are his best work by far, both in the draughtsmanship, the composition, and the beautiful mastery of aquatint. Though Die Tennisspieler is the only original work I have seen, everything else has been in reproduction.
ReplyDeleteDon't you think the Tennisspieler print looks as if it's the left-hand half of a pair, with the other panel depicting people walking/looking towards the figures in this image? That might fit with some decorative use of the image perhaps.
ReplyDeleteYes, it seems to imply an opponent, doesn't it? Quite possibly Eugen Kirchner was himself a keen tennis player, and this scene shows him and his immediate family/entourage; I can imagine a parallel scene with a brother or what-have-you facing this one. So far as I have cared to research this (i.e. looking it up very quickly on Wikipedia) tennis really evolved into its modern form at exactly this time, in the 1890s. It had certainly been developing for a couple of decades before that - Kilvert in the 1870s is playing "sphairistike", which he judges "a capital game, but rather too hot for a summer's day" - but modern lawn tennis only crystalises just before the creation of this image. How little it has changed since then! The ladies' clothes may be outmoded (though probably coming back into fashion any year now), but the young man still looks utterly contemporary.
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