Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) was one of the most important and colorful artistic personalities of the twentieth century, an icon of German Expressionism. To mark the hundredth anniversary of “Kirchner in Davos,” Thorsten Sadowsky presents here a compact artist monograph with rare archival material from throughout Kirchner’s career.

Touching on Kirchner’s myriad struggles, works, and milestones—from the radicalism of the artists’ association “Die Brücke” (The Bridge), which Kirchner cofounded, and the restless expressiveness of his Berlin and Davos years, to his struggles with mental instability and anxiety, and the reviews of his own works he published under the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle—Sadowsky lucidly retraces the artist’s turbulent trajectory. This erudite monograph shows how Kirchner, though vacillating between self-doubt and egocentricity, created an incomparably multi-faceted oeuvre with a remarkable instinct for the trends and imbalances of his time.