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On lightly ribbed chamois Japan laid paper. One of 13 known impressions by the artist. With the estate stamp and the inscription ‘H 345 D’ in ink and ‘K5425’ in pencil on the verso.
Earlier catalogues raisonnés: Schiefler H 345. There the description by Kirchner and Schiefler:
‘A jumbled tangle of white strokes and patches with dark areas, in which roofs and walls of huts, now and then also the hint of a fir tree, stand in the uncertain light of the moonlight. The course of the terrain goes from top left to bottom right; in the BE top left intersecting hatching of light cuts. In the sky the crescent moon.’
Further examples in the following collections: Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern; Kirchner Museum Davos; The British Museum London.
In 1915/16, Kirchner lost more and more precise control over his hands as his illness and morphine addiction progressed. Nevertheless, he worked intensively, but his brush, pen and pencil strokes increasingly became ‘strokes’; the parts of the woodcuts that were to remain white he did not cut into the wood but increasingly ‘tore’ them with the foot of his foot. This resulted in nervously vibrating, more or less parallel line layers. In this woodcut, this special and particularly conditional technique culminates in a fascinating moonlit night in the midst of a series of woodcuts of the landscape and life on the Stafelalp, which was to culminate in the grandiose colour woodcut Winter Moonlit Night 1919, the seismogram of a sleepless night of the nervous, who had by no means yet overcome illness and addiction.
