Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryEnglish Step Dancers
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Look at how the four colors, black, yellow, green and pink, lie in flat areas, and how the pink shows at the edges of the dark costumes.
Two step dancers in dark costumes stride past a potted plant in this color woodcut of 1911, the year Kirchner moved to Berlin. At lower left he wrote Eigendruck, German for “own print”. In 1918 the print was given to the art society of Jena, and in 1937 the German government seized it as “degenerate art” and had it sold.
color woodcut printed in black, yellow, green, and pink on blotting paper · image: 40.5 x 27.5 cm · National Gallery of Art · Die Brücke
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- English Step Dancers
- Artist
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner German, 1880 - 1938
- Date
- 1911
- Medium
- color woodcut printed in black, yellow, green, and pink on blotting paper
- Dimensions
- image: 40.5 x 27.5 cm (15 15/16 x 10 13/16 in.) sheet: 54 x 40 cm (21 1/4 x 15 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- National Gallery of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.