Damenbildnis (portrait of Charlotte Pechstein) was painted following Pechstein’s traumatic participation in the Battle of the Somme and subsequent discharge in 1917. The model, his first wife Lotte was the former Charlotte Kaprolat who he met during the spring of 1909. At sixteen years of age, she became the obliging participant on numerous occasions posing en plein air from which Pechstein fashioned evocations of frolicking female bathers. Lotte’s voluptuous contours had much to do with his more sumptuous depiction of the female form than that of Kirhner or Heckel whose more angular and stylized figures owed much to their depiction of African and Oceanic sculpture. But in the most direct sense, Lotte Pechstein was at the epicenter of the emerging gestural style of the Die Brücke school and the painters who sought to describe the primitive lifestyle they advocated. She was also the willing participant on her husband’s great adventure to the Palau Islands in the South Pacific in 1914. But for Max Pechstein, Lotte’s features and darker complexion matched his longing for everything wild and beautiful, the simple, unadulterated life beyond civilization that correlates to Gauguin’s own search for such an earthly paradise.  Here, in Damenbildnis, Pechstein pays homage to that woman and he did so without embellishment or distortion — she who helped him achieve his artistic breakthrough because of “her sensual lack of embarrassment.” (Max Pechstein, Glückliche Tage in der Südee, 1945)