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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is considered as a paragon of German expressionism. Until his suicide in 1938 on an alpine pasture, he worked consequently on the articulation value of human figures and landscapes in line and colour, not only as a painter, but also as a graphic artist and sculptor. On 7^th June 1905, together with Heckel, Bleyl and Schmidt-Rottluff, he founded an exhibition and studio community called "Brücke" (bridge) in a shoemaker's shop left open in Dresden. In their common "programme", which they published in the form of a woodcut, there was not much mention of their artistic aims; they rather cited the right of youth to change. They formulated it pathetically: "… as youth, bearing the future, we want to obtain elbowroom and freedom to live in the face of the established older forces. Everybody who reproduces directly and genuinely his creative urge belongs to us".

While to a great extent an autodidactic painter, Kirchner dedicated himself particularly during his short sojourn in Munich in 1903/4 to a thorough study of the nude, which remained a lifelong theme of his art. Female Nude, for which probably his friend Doris Groß, affectionately called "Dodo", had sat, was mainly painted in 1909 in Dresden. As after the war many of his pictures which had remained in his studio in Berlin had suffered from the transport to Davos, 'restorations' of the artist can be noted on them in 1919/20. This goes also for the Female Nude , which was painted over in some parts at that time. In precious green gleaming nudity, Dodo rests on a red carpet, with a desiring suffering look, seducing and seduced. On 5^th July, maybe at the time he renovated the Female Nude, 1919 he wrote in his diary on Dodo, from whom he separated in 1911: "… Still and fine and so lovely white. Your fresh love lust […]. But you gave me the strength to speak about your beauty in the purest picture of a woman […]. I know you sometimes think of me, we have both had happiness and agony."