Berna,
He was part of Die Brücke, the first group of German expressionists, whose members considered that the painter had to transform his individual experiences into art and there were no fixed rules for that, but he moved away from that group before he dissolved to consolidate his own trajectory, without companies, doubting the autonomy of color and form, despite the fact that for some time he was very influenced by the French Fauvism for some time.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner evolved by paths that led him far from what we understand today as Germanic expressionism: his art is plagued by tensions, audacies and contradictions and is little prone to stylistic labels. Despite his conjunctural identification with the bridge, he was a lonely, partly due to the nerve cords that in his case favored the cruelty of World War I, the postwar years and the terror of Nazism. Finally, the disease and despair led him to suicide in 1938, being in Switzerland.
His convulsive thoughts are reflected in the abundance of visions that we appreciate in his paintings, in his tendency to the apocalyptic, in the abrupt power of his palette and in the resource to the distortion of the ways to underline emotions. His intentional primitivism conjugated him with technical sophistication and an enigmatic symbolism, and his angle profiles, undulating or abrupt, seem loaded with nerve, with struggles between the intellectual and the sensory, a feature that clearly distinguishes his production from those who were his companions in Die Brücke.
Kirchner’s career can be considered structured in two fundamental stages, marked, the first, by the fascination with the great city understood almost as hell; And the second, for the search for an idealized but precarious balance, between society and nature: we notice it in its Alpine landscapes of Swiss inspiration, a country where peace would be temporarily from 1915.
Another fundamental feature of his work is the reconciliation of formal contrasts: its creation is not illustrative or literary, but translates reality, sometimes openly and sometimes covert, on the pictorial surface. In the beginning, inspired by a hope perhaps something naive in the social effectiveness of art, he wanted to destroy the illusion and penetrate the core of appearances: superficial beauty, for him, was an anatema.
Precisely in Switzerland, the country where he died, we can see this autumn a significant retrospective of this author: on September 12, Kunstmuseum Bern will open to the public “Kirchner X Kirchner”, anthology composed of 65 works barely exposed in that country that comes to remember and recreate what was the biggest sample of Kirchner organized during his life, presented in Kunsthalle Bern in 1933 Commissioned by himself, hence the title of this new project.
This next exhibition will study the juxtapositions and deliberate reworkings of his journey that Kirchner decided Sunday at the Alpscurrently work in the Kunstmuseum Bern funds, and its complementary Mountain peasants on Sundayfrom the German Federal Foreign Ministry. The two, initiated in 1923-1924, will be again in Bern and with them showed that, beyond their plastic forcefulness, it was also able to sign pieces that seduced a broad audience and not only to the understanding. Kirchner raised them together, but since that year 33 they had not seen each other again; The first was the only work of the German acquired by a Swiss museum in the artist’s life, coinciding with that exhibition of almost a century ago, while the second entered the art collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, first as a loan and finally as a permanent acquisition, in 1985.
Other pieces indicated in this retrospective will be DresDe Street (1908-1919), Arrival of MoMA in New York; Street with red cocotte (1914-1925), from the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum of Madrid; Clavadel mountain landscape (1927), in the funds of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Dance I Color (Essen Project) (1932), from the ESSEN Folkwang Museum; and Dining rooms (1930), of the Galerie Henze & Ketterer de Wichtrach/Bern.
Through the assembly and that very meditated reworking of some of his compositions, Kirchner sought to develop in 1933 a very his and alternative vision of his way and also offer visitors a molded experience according to their particular wishes; In addition to offering a compendium of his pictorial directions from a personal perspective, he made decisions of a designer. That anthology was possible thanks to the complicity of Max Huggler (1903-1994), then director of the Kunsthalle of the Swiss capital and later of Kunstmuseum Bern. Kirchner not only determined the selection of works and conceived the exhibition as a whole, but also designed the poster and the catalog; He even wrote the text that accompanied her under the pseudonym of Louis de Marsalle.
To what extent the artist considered the preparation of a sample as an artistic act per se It follows from a letter that Huggler sent himself on December 21, 1932: Mounting an exposure correctly in terms of color and shape is the same as composing a picture.
The objective of the next exhibition in Kunstmuseum Bern is not so much faithfully reproducing that historical presentation but also to illuminate its structure, intentions and effects on the public from a contemporary perspective. It is, in short, what possibilities an artist has to write his own story and why Kirchner chose this particular way of representation (of representing) on date as that of 1933. Even in what way that original form of portrait configures the vision of his work also today.
Nadine Franci, curator of engravings and drawings of the Kunstmuseum and her curator, pointed out that the retrospective of 1933 was much more than an exhibition: an artistic manifesto. We indicated that this date is important: it was a fundamental year for Kirchner, personally and political; When in his country his works were defamed and withdrawn from the museums, in neighboring Switzerland, where he resided since 1917, he was offered the opportunity to teach his work in its entirety: almost three hundred works were shown, most of his personal collection, but some, by his insistence, ceded by public and private collections to project an image of a consecrated creator.
“Kirchner X Kirchner” will cover in its development from the artist’s expressionist beginnings within Die Brücke to his final work in Davos, but unlike the historical exhibition, here the different phases of his career will have a more balanced weight. We can see works that were missing in Berna in 1933, either because Kirchner deliberately excluded them or because they were not available: we will glimpse what decisions he made at that time and why.
The presentation is divided into five thematic rooms with central groups of works and references to Kirchner’s curatorial thinking. The first room is dedicated to its years in Dresde and Berlin, with nudes, street and cabaret scenes that today we consider the best of its career. Ninety years ago, they were exhibited individually: Kirchner showed mainly pieces with which he had already reached recognition in Germany, or others that patent their stylistic innovations.
His late work, held for a long time for less significant, can now be seen in the last room; Kirchner however, in 1933, he gave him the high point of his exhibition, so that his evolution could be well appreciated. Deliberately juxtaposed pieces of different stages of his career and avoided a chronological classification; To some extent, he even rework early to show his lines of development more clearly. “Kirchner X Kirchner” will also adopt this approach to recognize both the stylistic diversity and the conceptual considerations that the artist had an into account.
A large main space will be dedicated to historical retrospective and two adjacent, smaller rooms, will focus on formal and compositional aspects. Works on paper will show how he experienced for centuries with color, plane, line and movement, and how his formal language remained faithful to himself even when mutating.
“Kirchner x Kirchner”
Kunstmuseum Bern
Hodlerstrasse, 8-12
Berna
From September 12, 2025 to January 11, 2026
