Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: a ‘true German artist’ who found peace in Switzerland

The four-meter-long painting Sonntag der Bergbauern [Sunday of the Mountain Farmers, 1923-24/26] had to be removed by a crane from the German Chancellery in Berlin for the exhibition in Bern. © Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Though he is often seen as a quintessentially German artist, the Expressionist painter and sculptor Ernst Ludwig Kirchner lived in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos for the last 20 years of his life. Nearly a century after a solo exhibition that he curated himself at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1933, the Kunstmuseum Bern is revisiting that show – with some help from the German chancellor.

This summer, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s monumental canvas Sunday of the Mountain Farmers was removed from the German chancellery. Its prestigious position for the past 50 years, in the room where the cabinet meets, has guaranteed the painting frequent appearances on the evening television news.

A crane was needed to hoist the four-metre-long painting down to the courtyard where Chancellor Friedrich Merz greets heads of state. Then it was transported to Bern for the Kunstmuseum’s current exhibition, Kirchner x Kirchner. In a temporary swap, the chancellery received Neue Sterne (New Stars), a painting by the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, for the cabinet room.

Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen [Sunday in the Alps. Scene at the Well, 1929]. © Kunstmuseum Bern

Sunday of the Mountain Farmers is now on show next to another painting by Kirchner of the same dimensions, Sunday in the Alps. Scene at the Well. These two huge canvases, dominated by vivid purples, greens and deep blues and depicting Alpine farmers at leisure outdoors, date from 1923/24. They are reunited for the first time since 1933, when Kirchner hung them together at his exhibition at Bern’s Kunsthalle.

A master of self-promotion much before social media: Kirchner in 1913 (or 1914). (C) Kunstmuseum Bern

The Kunstmuseum bought Sunday in the Alps. Scene at the Well from that show – the only Kirchner painting to be acquired by a Swiss museum in the artist’s lifetime. Together they form the centrepiece of Kirchner x Kirchner, which revisits the 1933 show and, according to the Kunstmuseum’s director Nina Zimmer, looks set to be one of the museum’s best-attended exhibitions of recent years.

For Kirchner, the 1933 exhibition was a welcome opportunity to gain profile in Switzerland at a time when his art, scorned by the Nazis as “degenerate”, was increasingly falling out of favour in Germany.

A master of self-promotion long before Instagram and influencers, Kirchner not only curated the exhibition; he also designed the poster and specified details about the catalogue, including the kind of paper and the fonts.

He even wrote short texts about individual artworks for the catalogue. “It became an expression of his artistic self-image and an act of self-assurance, artfully combining distance and control,” the curator Nadine Franci writes in the catalogue for the current exhibition at the Kunstmuseum.

‘Die Brücke’

“Sich kämmender Akt” [Nude Woman Combing Her Hair], 1913. © Brücke-Museum

Kirchner first visited Davos in January 1917 but returned to Berlin because it was too cold. Still, this brief trip must have made him want to go back for longer: he moved there, accompanied by his nurse, in May that year.

He was a mental and physical wreck. He had been discharged from service in the First World War because of mental illness in 1915 and spent much of the following year in sanatoriums in Berlin. Addicted to alcohol, sleeping tablets and morphine, he was suffering from blackouts and paralysis.

“Strasse mit roter Kokotte” [Street with Red Cocotte], 1914/25. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

He had already gained wide recognition in Germany. Together with Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, Kirchner had founded the “Brücke” group of artists in a disused shoe-maker’s shop in Dresden in 1905. Their revolutionary manifesto was to “call on all youth to unite, and as the standard-bearers of the future, assert our creative freedom and freedom of lifestyle in a stand against comfortably entrenched older forces”.

The Brücke paintings reflect their bohemian lifestyle, often portraying young female models skinny-dipping in the lakes around Dresden. Kirchner’s Two Nudes in Vertical Format and Nude Woman Combing her Hair, both on display at the Kunstmuseum Bern, date from around the time of the group’s breakup in 1913.

Kirchner was also inspired by the energy of the rapidly growing metropolis after the group moved to Berlin in 1911 and produced the erotically charged street scenes that he is still perhaps best known for, often featuring the angular figures of extravagantly dressed prostitutes and their besuited, hatted customers. One of these, Street with Red Cocotte (1914), is on loan to the Kunstmuseum from the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.

The magic mountain

After settling in Davos, Kirchner found some peace. His partner Erna Schilling joined him in 1921. Inspired by the mountains and farming communities, he began painting vibrant, tapestry-like landscapes such as Sertig Valley in Autumn (1925/1926), here on loan from the Kirchner Museum in Davos. In Seated Woman (1926), Schilling sits cross-legged in a red and blue dress on a balcony against a backdrop of mountains and trees.

Serene scenes of people enjoying nature like Before Sunrise (1925/1926) evoke a contemplative calm rare in his earlier work. Some of Kirchner’s later paintings veer towards abstract art: Twirling Dancer (1931/1932) conveys the blur of movement with a two-mouthed, four-armed dancing figure.

“Drehende Tanzerin” [Twirling Dancer, 1931/32] Stadel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Forever concerned about how his work would be received, Kirchner even wrote reviews of his exhibitions under the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle. After all, what better way is there to ensure insightful and intelligent criticism?

Ostensibly a French critic living in Morocco, de Marsalle gave Kirchner a way to explain his changes in style while lending his texts distance and authority. De Marsalle’s essay in the 1933 catalogue, his sixth text about Kirchner’s work, would also be his last: Kirchner killed him off by putting a cross next to his name to indicate he was deceased.

The calm he had found in Switzerland was not to last. He remained heavily reliant on a dwindling German market and by 1933, Kirchner was uneasy. In January, the month Adolf Hitler became chancellor, one German museum wrote to the Kunsthalle to say it could not loan a requested work because of a ban on lending – a hint of the restrictions to come.

Kirchner’s sculpture “Das Paar” (The Couple), exhibited in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, 1937. © Staatsarchiv Hamburg

In May that year, Kirchner wrote from Davos to the Frankfurt collector Carl Hagemann: “I am a bit tired and sad about the situation over there. War is in the air. In the museums, the hard-won cultural achievements of the past 20 years are being destroyed. Yet I founded the Brücke expressly to nurture true German art, made in Germany. Now that is all supposedly ‘un-German’. My God, that does upset me.”

He had been commissioned to paint frescoes for the Folkwang Museum in Essen, but in 1934, a year after the Nazis seized power, the museum’s director was fired and the frescoes never realised. Kirchner began taking morphine again for bowel pains in 1936.

In 1937, about 700 of his works were removed from German museums and from July of that year more than 30 were on display in Munich in the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition masterminded by Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to ridicule and vilify modern art. Kirchner’s mental health deteriorated. He shot himself near his home in 1938 and is buried at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Davos. He was 58.

Recognition in Switzerland

For a long time, Kirchner struggled to gain recognition in Switzerland. “People are used to French artists and are shocked at my forms and colours,” he wrote. But it is clear he made an impact there. The Kunstmuseum is showing a parallel exhibition, called Panorama Switzerland. From Caspar Wolf to Ferdinand Hodler, exploring how Swiss artists have portrayed the Alpine world over three centuries.

One room is devoted to a generation of young Expressionists from Basel for whom Kirchner served as an important influence; among them Albert Müller, whose intense violet, lilac, green and blue self-portrait borrows heavily from Kirchner’s palette.

Kirchner may have remained a “true German artist” in his foreign mountain haven, but he left his mark on Switzerland. Meanwhile, international recognition for the work he created there is still increasing – a development the Kunstmuseum’s exhibition will surely do much to encourage.

“Mountain Landscape from Clavadel”, a district of Davos, 1927. Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston

‘Kirchner x Kirchner’ is showing at the Kunstmuseum Bern until January 11, 2026. ‘Panorama Switzerland. From Caspar Wolf to Ferdinand Hodler’ runs until July 5, 2026.

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ts