The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart’s Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs houses the great treasure of 185 drawings and prints, as well as some illustrated books by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. This remarkable collection, compiled after World War II, comprises all of the artist’s creative periods and important themes. It also includes a portfolio of drawings from a “collection of Dr. Gervais, Zurich / Lyon,” apparently an invention of Kirchner’s student Christian Laely. Research findings on this fictitious collector are published here for the first time.

The “Gervais Collection” is, however, not the only previously “unknown collection”: Both in terms of size and diversity, the Staatsgalerie’s Kirchner holdings presented in this volume are a surprising discovery as a whole.