Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The artist (until at least 1937)

Willy Hahn, Berlin-Stettin

Galerie Ferdinand Möller, Berlin

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1953

Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 2000, no. 64, illustrated in the catalogue (titled Alpweg; Bergweg - Berglandschaft mit Alphütten and with incorrect measurements) 

The artist's photo album, vol. III, no. 145

Franz Berger, Das Funkhaus in Köln und seine Gestaltung. Architekt: P.F. Schneider, Stuttgart, 1955, illustrated p. 111

Donald E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Munich, 1968, no. 663, illustrated p. 370

Walter Först, Aus Köln in die Welt: Beiträge zur Rundfunkgeschichte, Cologne, 1974, illustrated in a photograph p. 577

Alpweg (Bergweg) is a striking example of Kirchner’s mountain landscapes, executed in the area around Davos, where he lived from 1917 until the end of his life. Having suffered from ill health after military service, the artist moved to Davos in order to convalesce, and the years that followed were marked not only by a dramatic change of lifestyle from his Dresden and Berlin years, but also by an important shift in his art. Mountains for Kirchner became a symbol of physical and mental regeneration and these majestic landscapes, as well as images of villages and farmers at work, became key subjects of his painting and of numerous photographs. In 1918 Kirchner moved into a spacious farmhouse in a hamlet known as In den Lärchen (‘among the larches’), near Frauenkirch in Davos (fig. 1), where he painted his first Alpine landscapes. In the present composition he depicts an autumnal view of the landscape, the diffused palette indicating an evening setting. The square format of the canvas emphasises the majestic quality of Alpine nature, and the viewer’s eye is taken into the depth of the composition by the brightly painted road twisting in between the wooden huts that punctuate the landscape.

Bernhard Mendes Bürgi wrote about Kirchner’s Alpine landscapes: ‘Kirchner’s revitalization of an entire genre, one that can so easily tend toward romanticism and sentimentality rather than pristine grandeur and magic, doubtless stemmed from the menacing fascination of the alpine world he sought to capture, which was at first quite new to him. It was his very unfamiliarity with the imposing mountain environment that laid the foundations of his authentic experience of nature and innovative artistic form – and this created by an artist whose Berlin street scenes at the nerve center of anonymous megalopolitan dynamics were thematic antitheses, and who now lived in seclusion among peasants, at times on an alpine pasture remote from the sanitariums of Davos immortalized by Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain’ (B. M. Bürgi in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Mountain Life (exhibition catalogue), Kunstmuseum, Basel, 2003-04, p. 13).