The bridge near meadows

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The bridge at Wiesen (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)
The bridge near meadows
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , 1926
Oil on canvas
120 × 120 cm
Kirchner Museum , Davos

The bridge near Wiesen , also called The Wies (e) ner Viadukt , is the title of a late Expressionist painting by the German painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from 1926, which depicts the Wiesen Viaduct south of Davos Wiesen . The picture is now part of the inventory of the Kirchner Museum Davos .

description

The picture is made using the technique of oil painting on canvas. It has a square format of 120 × 120 cm. It is signed on the front lower right of the center; it is dated “26” on the reverse. In the Kirchner catalog raisonné by the US art historian Donald E. Gordon it bears the number G 844.

The picture shows in its center the railway viaduct of the Rhaetian Railway over the Landwasser river near Davos-Wiesen, a well-known building of the alpine railway architecture. The building was completed in 1909, so it was still quite new at the time the painting was made. Kirchner depicts the view of the viaduct from the south. Compared to Kirchner's earlier depictions of buildings, which often showed distorted proportions and perspectives, this picture is close to reality. In his depiction, Kirchner observes the lines of the bridge and precisely reproduces the parabolic construction of the main arch and the semicircular formation of the smaller arches. The colors of the picture do not correspond to nature, but to Kirchner's artistic concept.

The Wiesen Viaduct in winter

A red and white railway signal can be seen on the left edge of the picture above the bridge, a so-called hip turning window . Even after it was shut down in 1987, the signal was left as a memorial at this point, perhaps because Kirchner immortalized it in the picture.

While Kirchner, who also had a degree in architecture , first addressed the landscape and its "architecture" in his pictures, over the years the architecture in the landscape increasingly became the subject of the picture, for which the painting "The Bridge near Wiesen" was used typical example.

In the years 1925/1926 Kirchner began to see a stylistic break. In his figure representations he tried abstract approaches, as they emerged everywhere in painting in the 1920s, while in his landscapes he pursued an exact objectivity without formal experiments, such as the distortions painted earlier.

How long Kirchner worked on this picture and when he started the preparatory work for it is not known. However, a draft of the picture has been preserved, which Kirchner made around 1924. This drawing was donated to the Kirchner Museum Davos from a private collection in Hamburg.

Provenance

In 1933 the community of Davos acquired the painting "Rathaus Davos Platz" after lengthy purchase negotiations at the instigation of the Davos Landammann Erhard Branger (1881-1958), despite resistance from the population of Kirchner. The artist not only gave the community a considerable discount on the originally estimated purchase price, but also gave the community the painting "Die Brücke bei Wiesen" as a bonus. In a letter to the Grand District Administrator of Davos, Kirchner explained why he chose this picture as an encore:

"... and give the picture" Wiesener Viadukt ", which is artistically equivalent to the picture" Davos-Platz "as well as in size and, together with the first, forms a worthy, elegant ornament of the Landammann's room ... Because the choice is up For artistic reasons, I had to give the picture “Wiesener Viadukt” to “Davos-Platz”. If the choice had fallen on the mountain spring, I would have brought and given another picture of the same size. ... The monumental calm and elegant effect of the two equally large pictures on the wall of the Landammannszimmer will convince everyone who can see; ... "

- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner : Letter from June 10, 1933

From the summer of 1933, “Die Brücke bei Wiesen” hung with two other Kirchner pictures in Branger's office in the Davos town hall until he left his office in 1936. The whereabouts of the picture in the following decades is unclear. In the 1960s it was open to the public and housed unprotected in the premises of the Davos Tourist Association . From the end of the 1960s, the painting was exhibited in numerous art museums in European cities and in the United States , for example in Boston , Seattle and Pasadena . The insurance value of the picture increased steadily over time.

In 1982 "Die Brücke bei Wiesen" was donated to the collection of the Kirchner Museum in Davos. It has been one of the regularly exhibited pictures ever since.

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Davoser Blätter, LXVII, July 21, 1938, ill. P. 6.
  • Walter Kern: Graubünden in painting. Oprecht, Zurich 1941, OCLC 72560238 , Fig. 1.
  • Walter Lepori: "Magic Mountains". On Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Davos mountain pictures. Zurich 1989, OCLC 637810545 .
  • Christian Virchow: "The bridge near Wiesen". On the story of a picture by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner . In: Davoser Revue (=  The Wiesner Viaduct from an art and architectural perspective ). No. 4 , vol. 88, 2013, OCLC 887720788 , pp. 14-25 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Donald Edward Gordon: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With a critical catalog of all paintings. Munich 1968
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Henze (Ed.): Catalog of the collection. Volume 1: Paintings, watercolors, pastels, drawings, woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, sculptures. Kirchner Museum, Davos 1992, p. 274, no.372.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Christian Virchow: "The bridge near Wiesen". On the story of a picture by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner . In: Davoser Revue (=  The Wiesner Viaduct from an art and architectural perspective ). No. 4 , vol. 88, 2013, OCLC 887720788 , pp. 14-25 .
  4. ↑ Hippsche turning disc in the Albula Railway Museum (with picture) ( Memento of the original from August 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , bahnmuseum-albula.ch, accessed on October 23, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bahnmuseum-albula.ch
  5. ^ Max Harms: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Davos landscape pictures. Master's thesis, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen 2008, p. 30.
  6. ↑ Lucius Grisebach, Annette Meyer zu Eissen and Ulrich Luckhardt in the National Gallery Berlin (ed.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner . Catalog for the exhibition in Berlin, Munich, Cologne and Zurich 1979. ISBN 3-7913-0488-7 , p. 283 f.