One of Germany’s leading Expressionist artists, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner suffered from chemical dependency and mental illness. Eventually he went to Switzerland for treatment and stayed on. In 1921, he met the dancer Nina Hard in Zurich and took her back to his home despite the protests of his wife, Erna, who divided her time between Berlin and Switzerland. Here we see Nina in Kirchner’s studio. In the background is a painting or a weaving of Nina in the company of other nude figures. As a young man, Kirchner looked to Matisse for inspiration, drawings on the older artist’s practice of simplifying art, concentrating on nude figures, playing with rhythmic patterning, and using high-keyed, seemingly arbitrary colors. Here, years later, we can see that Kirchner was far from imitative in his adoption of Matisse’s ideas. He drove them to extremes to express his own brand of primal emotion.