Alpine cuisine

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Alpine kitchen (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)
Alpine cuisine
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , 1918
Oil on canvas
121.5 × 121.5 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
The same, almost unchanged interior of the alpine kitchen in 2016
The outside of the alpine hut (2016)
Tinzenhorn

The picture Alpküche by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was created in Switzerland in 1918 and shows the small kitchen of a mountain hut on the Stafelalp ( 1900  m above sea level ), above Davos Frauenkirch , which the artist temporarily lived in. The house is still in almost original condition. The picture comes from Kirchner's estate and today belongs to the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

description

The picture has a square format with the dimensions 121.5 × 121.5 cm, it is executed in the painting technique oil on canvas , there is a small signature at the bottom right: EL Kirchner and on the back is the name KN-Da / Ad2 . It bears the number 518 in Donald E. Gordon's catalog raisonné. It was exhibited in Frankfurt / Main in 1922 and in Berlin in 1926.

Kirchner entered the small mountain hut rented by a local farmer for the first time in the early summer of 1918. Much was still lacking in furnishings and materials, but in the summer of the same year artistic work was possible there. In June 1918 he wrote to his friend Henry van de Velde that "the rooms were very unusual, the cracks between the woods were stuffed with moss, and there was a 'beautiful pot-bellied stove' in the kitchen". The artist lived here in the summers of his first Davos years. Kirchner felt healthy and could paint. By Christmas 1918, however, he was no longer able to continue working on the pictures he had begun, as he again had artistic problems with the implementation of his imagination. In a letter to the Hamburg art collector Gustav Schiefler he wrote: “I longed so much to turn my pure imagination into work that can be seen in dreams, but the impression of reality is so rich here that its design consumes all strength . […] The landscape is wonderfully beautiful even in winter, I'm trying the color of the snow and the strange shapes of people and animals it has formed. ” Kirchner wrote under the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle in 1922 in the catalog of his exhibition at Ludwig Schames in Frankfurt on Main about his work on the Stafelalp at that time: “The barren and yet so intimate nature of the high mountains had a great influence on the painter. She deepened his love for objects and at the same time cleaned his conception of all trivialities. [...] how tenderly every necessary detail has been worked through. ”In older pictures of interior views, such as the interior from 1914 (Gordon 412), in which a family situation seems threatening, the alpine kitchen has an atmosphere of calm and summery warmth .

The art historian and specialist for interior painting around 1900 Felix Krämer writes that in this picture, in contrast to earlier interior depictions in which the figures “dominate their surroundings”, it is different here, because “here the space with its aligned lines and the strong luminosity of the colors the figure. [...] The room loses its protective function. [...] what can be associated with the insecure psyche of the resident. "

At the table, bent forward, sits a person who Roman Norbert Ketterer , Kirchner's estate administrator, but also Felix Krämer assume is the artist himself working on a lithographic stone. The British art historian Peter Vergo, on the other hand, suspects that it was his partner Erna Schilling who is sitting there at the table.

The view falls through the open door over the terrace, further over the other chalets of the Stafelalp and extends to the southwestern Tinzenhorn , which in this picture forms the perspective vanishing point and which Kirchner often appears as a painterly motif in his Davos pictures.

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Felix Krämer: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Retrospective . Exhibition catalog. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7757-2552-1 , p. 179 and 273 .

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Delfs (Ed.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The entire correspondence. Volume 1, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-9813285-0-9 . P. 322.
  2. ^ Representation in the exhibition catalog of the Berlin National Gallery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-7913-0488-7 , p. 240 f.
  3. ^ Felix Krämer in: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner retrospective. Catalog for the exhibition at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-7757-2552-1 , p. 273.
  4. ^ Donald Edward Gordon: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With a critical catalog of all paintings. Munich 1968, pp. 120 and 349.
  5. ^ Description of the picture on the website of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.
  6. ^ Jürgen Fenn: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the Frankfurt Städel. schneeschmelze.wordpress.com, May 8, 2010, accessed October 5, 2016 .