- 51
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Description
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
- Waldinneres (Forest Interior)
- signed E.L. Kirchner (lower right)
- oil on canvas
- 178 by 135cm.
- 70 1/8 by 53 1/8 in.
Provenance
Sale: Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett, Stuttgart, March/April 1953, lot 16
Dr Walter Leder, Winterthur (acquired by 1968)
Thence by descent
Exhibited
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Kirchner, 1952, no. 70
Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, 1953 (on loan or exhibition - to check)
Stuttgart, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Kirchner, 1956, no. 31
Seattle, Seattle Art Museum; Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum & Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1968-69, no. 69, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Zurich, Kunsthaus & Munich, Haus der Kunst, Die dreissiger Jahre - Schauplatz Deutschland, 1977, no. 33 (titled as Hommage à Klee and as dating from 1935-36)
Literature
Erhard Branger, 'Zu Kirchners Bergbildern', in Davoser Revue, no. XIII, 9th June 1938, p. 191
Donald E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968, no. 1017, illustrated p. 414; illustrated in colour pl. XXVIII
Catalogue Note
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).