#bodies

Painting a ceiling wasn't the job he wanted — he thought of himself as a sculptor and took it on under pressure, then spent four years craning upward at it. This is one panel out of a long run of scenes across the whole ceiling, which I hadn't realised. Supposedly it all looked far dimmer until a cleaning in the eighties that people argued about for years afterwards.

Nobody commissioned this one. It was, from what I've read, a deliberate swing at getting noticed — built out of long conversations with two men who lived through the wreck, plus a scale model of the raft set up in the studio. The disaster itself was a national scandal, mostly because the captain had got his command through connections rather than any skill at sea.

They say Kirchner and his Die Brücke friends thought cheap, loud entertainment — circuses, wrestling matches, variety halls — was more honest than anything on a proper stage.