Max Pechstein, 'Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt', 1910

Charlotte Cuhrt was 15 years old when Max Pechstein painted this striking full-length portrait. The daughter of Max Cuhrt, a successful solicitor and patron of the avant-garde, she sits confidently in an armchair, her big, black eyes looking directly at the viewer. She’s dressed in red, with a large, dark hat on her head and a flamboyant ring on her left hand. The pose, the outfit, the gaze: everything in this painting conveys Charlotte’s strong presence. Displayed in an altar-like, custom-made wooden frame – an artwork in itself – the picture was part of a wider decorative scheme for the Cuhrts’ lavish apartment in Kurfürstendamm 152, Berlin. The architect Bruno Schneidereit, assisted by Pechstein, conceived the extravagant flat as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, a total work of art, in which every element of the architecture, furniture, and decoration would coexist in aesthetic harmony. Pechstein, in 1910, was at the peak of his career. After a conventional artistic training at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, he took up a dramatic, Expressionist style, profoundly influenced by the art of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. Their dynamic brushwork, combined with the highly saturated colours of the Fauves, and non-Western artefacts that he saw at Dresden’s Ethnographic Museum, had a lasting impact on his style. In 1906 he joined the artistic group Die Brücke (The Bridge) alongside Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Eric Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, among others. As an avant-garde movement aiming to ‘attract all revolutionary and restless forces’, Die Brücke played a crucial role in the development of German Expressionism.