About the work

Happy and pleased to have found a new home after a quite difficult phase of life in the high Swiss Alps near Davos, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner gradually found peace in the seclusion of simple mountain life. “It is wonderful up here. Mountains and people have a soothing effect on me”, the artist wrote in the summer of 1918. Here he acquired new creative energy, leading to paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints and wood sculptures in quick succession. Also including portraits and self-portraits, in addition to a large number of mountain panoramas and representations of Alpine life.

In comparison to the paintings of earlier years, a gradual transformation in the style of Kirchner’s painting now took place. The artist increasingly left the pulsating and nervous pictorial language of the metropolitan Berlin representations behind him and turned to a more peaceful manner of representation that emphasised areas.

In addition to this, he also turned to a new colour palette, but now preferred more delicate, pastel hues in comparison to the often-intense colours of past work phases. Like in this wonderful girl’s head from 1919/20. Here the figure is dominated by gentle rose, brilliant pink and cool shades of blue, accompanied by small, violet sprinklings. The chord is contrasted by a bright, radiant red and a deep, glowing dark red in the sleeves of the dress, in the hair of the young woman and in the small wood sculpture on the windowsill in the background.

“It would […] not be correct to judge my paintings by the standard of faithful accuracy”, the artist wrote in 1925 in his Davos journal, “because they are not depictions of particular things or beings, but are instead autonomous organisms of lines, areas and colours, which contain natural forms only to the extent that they are required as a key to understanding. My paintings are allegories, not illustrations.”