Grosses Schererportrait (Der Maler; Zeichnender Maler; Grünes Selbstbildnis vor Landschaft) is a striking portrait from Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner’s post-war corpus. Executed in the area around Davos, where Kirchner lived from 1917 until the end of his life, the present canvas is a symphony of blossoming color, capturing an idealized vignette from the artist’s fertile imagination. Kirchner’s portraits rank alongside his Berlin street scenes as his most important works (see fig. 1).

Grosses Schererportrait (Der Maler; Zeichnender Maler; Grünes Selbstbildnis vor Landschaft) has a fascinating history. Considered for over sixty-five years to be a self-portrait of the artist, scholarship in 1990s has led to the sitter in this painting being reidentified as the Swiss Expressionist painter Hermann Scherer, one of Kirchner’s favorite pupils at the time. Dr. Wolfgang Henze of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archiv has thus retitled the work Grosses Schererportrait and maintained other historic titles for the piece in brackets including Der Maler, Zeichnender Maler and Grünes Selbstbildnis vor Landschaft. Acquired by the previous owner in 1958, Grosses Schererportrait has been out of public view for well over half a century.

Grosses Schererportrait was completed during Kirchner’s years in Davos (1917-1926), where he spent the decade communing with nature and recovering from a nervous condition brought on during the First World War in Germany. Rather than confining himself to the sanitariums immortalized in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Kirchner chose the remote pastures of Wildboden and immersed himself in a series of paintings that celebrated the landscape through the filter of his mind. Kirchner did not paint these works on site, but rather interpreted the landscape around him from memory and through his own emotional aesthetic. "I long so much to produce works from pure imagination," he wrote during his first months in Davos, "but the impression created by reality is so rich here that depicting it consumes all of one's energies" (quoted in Exh. Cat., Basel, Kunstmuseum, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mountain Life, The Early Years in Davos, 1917-1926, 2003, p. 15).

When Kirchner painted the present canvas in 1923, he was fully aware of the positive effects that mountain life was having on his art. In an essay he wrote in 1925 about his production, he listed "experience of the mountains" as the crucial factor in his aesthetic development. Beate Ritter summarizes this change of impetus writing: “Whereas his main inspiration in Dresden and Berlin had been scenes of bohemian life and the dancing girls of the variety theaters, in Davos it was the ordinary peasant folk and the scenery round about which caught his attention, including the confines of his own Alpine hut and the views it commanded of the Stafelalp” (Beate Ritter “In the Mountains: Kirchner’s First Years in Davos” in Exh. Cat., Frankfurt, Städel Museum, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Retrospective, 2010, p. 175). Aside from the relatively rare instances of self-portraits and portraits, Kirchner’s work during this period was increasingly focused on the dazzling landscapes that surrounded him as well as the local people in both their daily work and in more idealized moments such as dances, Sunday rest and other leisure pursuits.

In his monumental canvas Sunday in the Alps; Scene at the Well, painted in the same years as the present work, a frieze-like arrangement of men, women and children gather around the local water source (see fig. 2). Extending into the background are houses and pathways through the valley amongst the mountains. The female figures’ dress, presumably refined for Sunday outings, exhibits the same qualities seen in the female figure in the background of the present composition—the gaily patterned headscarves and aprons echoing each other. By the early 1920s Kirchner would have been very familiar with this regional dress, though the walking stick seemingly held by the figure in the background of Grosses Schererportrait could almost be the cosmopolitan parasol from a bustling Berlin street scene of ten years prior. Is the woman in the background simply a local resident walking the mountain paths or is she an amalgamation of women past and present in Kirchner’s life? There is a dream-like quality to this canvas. The artist, painting his pupil seated in nature’s abundance catching him in a moment of creation. Is he drawing the female figure in the background as the center of a different composition? Such questions are not easily resolved in portraits in general and in Kirchner’s work more specifically.

Until 1990, the present work had been identified as one of the approximately twenty-five painted self-portraits of Kirchner. In his analysis of this work in the 1991 exhibition Ipotesi Helvetia: un certo espressionismo, Martin Schwander, a scholar of Scherer’s work, asserted that this painting was in fact a portrait of the artist Hermann Scherer, not Kirchner’s self-portrait. Dr. Wolfgang Henze of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archiv has agreed with this analysis, citing this work’s title as Der Maler in the 1924 Winterthur exhibition of Kirchner’s works as well as 1935 letter from Kirchner to Karl Im Obersteg in which he refers to his “large Scherer portrait.” Prior to this analysis, only one dedicated portrait in oil of Scherer was known (Gopel 743; see fig. 3). In addition Kirchner painted a group portrait of himself with Scherer and the artist Paul Camenisch, which echoes a photograph taken of the three artists the year following (see figs. 4 & 5). Both the portrait of Scherer alone and the group portrait are held in museum collections, making the present work the only oil portrait Kirchner painted of Scherer remaining in private hands.

Scherer and Camenisch, along with the artist Albert Müller, were the three founding members of the Rot-Blau group. “The Rot-Blau group came into being when the artists Hermann Scherer, Albert Müller, and Paul Camenisch saw a Kirchner exhibition in Basel and were so impressed that on New Year’s Eve 1924 they decided to form a group of their own. They then spent several weeks each in Frauenkirch, receiving individual coaching from Kirchner, who worked with them intensively and at times even regarded himself as their teacher” (Beate Ritter “In the Mountains: Kirchner’s First Years in Davos” in Exh. Cat., Frankfurt, Städel Museum, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Retrospective, 2010, p. 176). The summer prior, in 1923, Scherer had spent several weeks in the mountains with Kirchner. It was during this sojourn that Kirchner painted the present work (though he backdated this work to 1922, a fairly common practice for the artist). The fact that Kirchner shows his fellow artist in the act of drawing or painting has a distinct resonance as Scherer was at this point solely known for his sculpture. “In fact it is Hermann Scherer who is pictured,” writes Martin Schwander, “sitting in his travel suit in a lush summery meadow while drawing. Kirchner first exhibited the work in Winterthur in 1924 titled as Der Maler (The Painter). While it is drawing—Scherer’s central artistic discovery in the summer of 1923—which is at the forefront of this image, the title conveys that Scherer saw himself as a painter, not merely a sculptor who also draws” (Martin Schwander, “Hermann Schere” in Exh. Cat., Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti & Locarno, Pinacoteca Communcale, Casa Rusca, Ipotesi Helvetia: un certo espressionismo, 1990-91, p. 99).

A few years after the present work was painted, Kirchner created one of the defining images of the Der Brücke movement (see fig. 6). Though founded in 1905 and dissolved in 1913, Kirchner chose to celebrate the most famed artists from the movement, including himself, in the late 1920s. Kirchner was intimately connected to the formation of the group—he was the principle author of their 1906 manifesto—and to its demise when he wrote Chronik der Brücke in 1913. Unlike his painting of himself with Hermann Scherer and Paul Camensich, where the three men are posed in an Alpine landscape, here the figures—Kirchner himself, Otto Mueller, Erick Heckel and Karl Schidt-Rottluff—are depicted in an interior setting, seemingly deep in conversation.

The celebration of one artist at work by another is an important trope in avant-garde movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vincent van Gogh was depicted painting his famed Sunflowers by Paul Gauguin; Monet was captured in his garden hard a work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Gabriele Münter stood in the Bavarian landscape at her easel in Kandinsky’s 1910 composition (see figs. 7-9).

Artists today take on not only their contemporaries as subject matter but look back to the revolutionary artists of the past. Rudolf Stingel, for example, started, in 2005, to paint self-portraits based on photographic portraits of himself taken by Sam Samore. Some years later he revised this method using photographic self-portraits Kirchner had taken of himself to create detailed grisaille canvases of these images (see figs. 10 & 11). Kirchner was an avid photographer throughout most of his artistic career, often capturing himself, his lovers and friends on film.

In Grosses Schererportrait, the artist appears to be expressing a particularly contented period. Living in the Alps and mentoring a group of artists eager to learn from him, Kirchner was relatively healthy after the trials and tribulations of addiction and mental breakdown precipitated by World War I. Painted on a large scale with expressive, dynamic brushwork and a real energy of feeling Grosses Schererportrait is a masterpiece of Kirchner’s Davos period.

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