Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

Details
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

Davos-Platz am Bahnhof

with an incised letter K at the upper left, the Nachlass stamp numbered DA/Ab9 on the reverse, oil on canvas
35¾ x 47¼ in. (90.7 x 120 cm.)

Painted in 1931
Provenance
The Artist's Estate
Roman Norbert Ketterer, Campione, Italy, 1969
Literature
D.E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968, no. 957, (illustrated p. 405)
Exhibited
Bremen, Kunsthalle, Meisterwerke des deutschen Expressionismus Mar.-Nov. 1960, no. 50. This exhibition later travelled to Hannover, Kunstverein; The Hague, Gemeentemuseum; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, and Zurich, Kunsthaus, May-June 1961
Campione, Italy, Roman Norbert Ketterer Moderne Kunst VI, 1969, no. 54 (illustrated in colour)

Lot Essay

From 1923 until his death in 1938 Kirchner lived and worked in a spacious farmhouse on the Wildboden near the Frauenkirch valley, not far from Davos. Kirchner regularly visited Zurich, Basle and Berlin to renew his love of city-life, although few paintings now resulted from these travels. It was during the Davos that he consolidated his new, relatively abstract style, as Davos-Platz am Bahnhof demonstrates. D. E. Gordon writes "Despite the hardships of these years, painting from the early 1930s display a new conviction in form and compositional integration.. The mature stage of Kirchner's abstract style is one of the more interesting phases of interwar German abstract art. There is a primitive quality to many of the forms.. The intuitive lyricism of this style (less introverted than Schlemmer's but otherwise closer to it than to Klee's among contemporary Bauhaus styles) is a measure to the artistic distance Kirchner has travelled from this late Expressionist works a decade before. In surface quality too, although susceptible to a tendency toward poster-like design again not unlike some Bauhaus artists), these most heavily painted pictures are 'sharper and clearer', more optically vibrant in colour and pattern, and more unreservedly sensuous than any works in the post-war oeuvre thus far." (D. E. Gordon, Kirchner, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, pp. 136 and 138)

This work is recorded in the Kirchner Archive, photograph album III, no. 280

This work is also listed in the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archives, Wichtrach/Bern

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