RICHMOND, VA.- The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) announced the historic return of a major watercolor by German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the museum’s Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection. In July 2025, Dr. Annemarie and Prof. Dr. Günther Gercken made the fair and just decision to restitute Kirchner’s watercolor Im Bett liegender Mann (Selbstbildnis) to the Fischer family descendants through their representatives, S+N Rechsanwälte, in Berlin, Germany. The Fischer heirs then donated the work to VMFA through a generous gift-purchase arrangement.

“The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is honored to continue its stewardship of Ludwig and Rosy Fischer’s extraordinary collection of German art,” said Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “We are delighted that this important and profoundly personal watercolor has been returned to the Fischer family and that it joins other important works by Kirchner in the museum’s Fischer Collection.”

Ludwig and Rosy Fischer were forward-thinking collectors in Frankfurt, Germany, who between 1905 and 1925 built one of the most impressive collections of German Expressionist art, with a special emphasis on the artists of the Die Brücke movement. Their sons, Ernst and Max, inherited the collection of approximately 500 works in 1926. Shortly after the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which prohibited “non-Aryans” from holding positions in the civil service. As a result, Ernst Fischer lost his position at the University of Frankfurt and left the country with his family in 1934, eventually settling in Richmond, Virginia, with his half of the art collection he inherited from his parents.

Max Fischer fled Germany in October 1935, a month after the passage of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which stripped people of Jewish descent of their basic rights as citizens. As a result, he was able to take only a few works out of Germany, and the remaining artworks from his portion of the collection were presumed lost or stolen. However, after Max’s death in 1954, Ernst continued to inform museums and German Expressionist scholars about the loss of his brother’s works in case they came across information related to them. In recent years, a renewed emphasis on Nazi-era restitution efforts in Germany and the U.S. combined with new archival discoveries have brought some of these works of art to light.

In 2009, the Fischer Collection became the last refugee collection of German Expressionism to enter a U.S. museum when it was acquired by VMFA through a gift-purchase agreement with Ernst’s widow, Anne Fischer. This is the fourth artwork to be returned to the Fischer Collection since 2015, when Kirchner’s painting Sand Hills at Grünau was restituted by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to the descendants of Max Fischer as the result of a related Nazi era restitution case and was acquired by VMFA through a similar gift-purchase arrangement. Upon the occasion of that initial restitution, the Fischer family made clear their commitment to not only reunite that work with the Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection at VMFA, but also any future works from Max’s portion of the collection that were restituted to the family. The two other works that have been returned to the Fischer Collection at VMFA are Taunus Road, also by Kirchner, in 2021, and Siblings (Geschwister), by Erich Heckel, in 2020.

“Having grown up in a home surrounded by these incredible works of art, it was a natural decision to send any restituted works to VMFA, to rejoin the Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection at the museum,” said Eva Fischer Marx. “By reuniting this watercolor with the rest of the collection, we honor our grandparents’ vision and our parents’ dedication to sharing these works with the public.”

While they collected every genre of German Expressionist art, Ludwig and Rosy Fischer placed a strategic focus on acquiring important portraits the artists made of people within their circle, as well as self-portraits by the artists in their collection. Such portraits played an important role, not necessarily as a means to capture a flattering likeness of the sitter but rather to convey the subject’s personality through gestural brushstrokes and a vivid palette of bold colors. Exaggerated features, distorted proportions and dynamic lines all helped to express mood or states of mind.

Several works in the Fischer Collection demonstrate that Ludwig and Rosy Fischer must have had a particularly strong sensitivity to the ways in which Kirchner expressed his emotional distress in the midst of World War I. Scholars have typically described the period of 1915 through 1918 as Kirchner’s “crisis” years. After the war broke out in 1914, Kirchner enlisted in a reserve field artillery unit but was discharged after suffering a mental and physical breakdown. In the years that followed, Kirchner traveled between Switzerland and Germany, continuing his recovery in various sanatoriums, before settling permanently in Switzerland.

The restituted watercolor is a study for Kirchner’s important 1918 painting, Selbstbildnis als Kranker (Der Kranker), in the collection of the Pinakothek der Moderne museum in Münich, Germany. Loosely painted, Im Bett liegender Mann includes iconography Kirchner developed across several works in different mediums that reference his illness: He wears a robe with a pattern around the collar and cuff; his hair is longer and more disheveled than in other self-portraits; his neck is disproportionately long; and the delicate pencil lines on his face suggest the severe contours under his eyes and cheeks.

“The medium of watercolor produced the sense of a quickly executed, dynamic composition, even if it was a carefully considered image of his illness,” said Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Each work from Max’s portion of the collection which has rejoined the larger Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection at VMFA deepens our understanding of Ludwig and Rosy Fischer’s vision as collectors and expands our ability to tell their family’s story. We are thrilled to add this work to the collection thanks to the generosity of the Fischer family.”

The Fischer Collection will be the subject of a major exhibition at the museum following the completion of the museum’s upcoming expansion and renovation project.