Ernst Luwig Kirchner: Mountain Life: The Early Years in Davos 1917-1926

The German-born Expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) first came to Davos in 1917 on a rest cure. His body and mind devastated by the war, mountain life promised recovery and proved extremely fruitful artistically. If at first Kirchner met his new environment with the same nervous brushstrokes and perspectivist escalations found in his Berlin street scenes, his inner turmoil soon subsided, producing calmer and stronger bands of pigment and later an exalted experience of nature. New imagery resulted as well, going beyond Kirchner's primary focus on landscapes to include interiors and a series of self-portraits and figure paintings of rural neighbors. With its selection of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, photographs and tapestry from European and American private collections, this monograph shows how Kirchner, after Segantini and Hodler, became the third great painter of the Alps. Life in the Mountains finishes with works from the years 1925-26, when Kirchner returned to Germany, leaving his union with the natural life behind.