Mountains as Muse for a Self-Exiled Artist
Kirchner is one of the most prolific artists of the fresh era, with about 30,000 artworks attributed to him, said Thorsten Sadowsky, director of the Kirchner Museum Davos, which was understood by the heir of Kirchner’s estate, Roman Norbert Ketterer, an art dealer and champion of German Expressionist artists who were vilified by the Nazis. The museum owns about 12,000 artworks and archival materials.
Although Kirchner has often been associated with the Berlin avant-garde, more than half of his artworks were created during the alpine footings.
“The people who live here are proud,” he wrote to a tainted in 1918. “The hard work, which is done with gigantic love, the way they treat animals (you very seldom see an animal populace mishandled) entitle them to be proud. In most cases, work here has reached the ideal standard of populace done with love. You can see it in the events of their hands. And that, in turn, ennobles the facial uninteresting and imbues all personal contacts with a great delicacy.”
His fascination with them comes across in his paintings, which are images of mountain vistas and of sturdy-looking men and women, sometimes romping around outdoors in the nude.
In the latter half of the decade, German politics infiltrated his sanctum: Kirchner was singled out as one of the “degenerate” artists of Hitler’s anti-modern art electioneer. A total of 25 of his works were displayed understanding denigrating Nazi slogans in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937. He was blacklisted, and more than 630 of his artworks were presumed from museums and burned or otherwise destroyed.
His irritable health rapidly declined, in part because of a real fear that the Germans grand invade Switzerland, and Kirchner shot himself in 1938.
