Frankfurt curator uncovers valuable, previously unknown painting

A curator at Frankfurt's Staedel Museum discovered an unknown work by German painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the museum said in an announcement this week. The two-sided painting was in storage at the Staedel and shows images of a nude woman in a studio on one side and figures in a forest on the other.

Previously, the work was presumed fake and had not been examined by experts. Nonetheless, art historians now agree that the painting is authentic.

"Actually this piece was quite easy to identify," Wolfgang Henze of the Kirchner Archive in Basel told the dpa news agency. "Kirchner is very difficult to copy - it's practically impossible to produce fakes of his drawings in particular."

The painting represents an important discovery for art experts in light of its quality and the fact that the piece was not reworked like many of Kirchner's other paintings.

The find was made during preparations for the Staedel's current retrospective on Kirchner, featuring 170 works by the renowned expressionist artist. The exhibition runs until July 25.

Author: Greg Wiser (AP/dpa)
Editor: Stuart Tiffen