Segelboot bei Fehmarn (Sailboat off Fehmarn)

This dramatic woodcut is considered to be among the finest German Expressionist prints of its kind. It shows the artist's wife Gerda with other figures seated in a boat with great black sails, as it moves past the distant shoreline of Fehmarn, an island in the Baltic. Kirchner was the founder of the Die Bruecke (the Bridge) artists' group in Dresden, 1905. His visits to the island from 1908 provided an idyllic alternative to city life where he could be free to develop deeply expressive work of power and energy. The print encapsulates this, with intense contrasts of dark and light and distorted perspective in a taut, segmented composition.