Dhe mountain town of Davos is now known – beyond skiing and ice hockey – to a wider public outside Switzerland primarily for the annual World Economic Forum, which for a week turns the high-altitude town into a circus of globalization and its critics. This year's guests include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his French colleague Emmanuel Macron and Chinese Prime Minister Li Qang. But more than a century ago, an even more remarkable spirit found refuge here, in the silence and seclusion of the mountains: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, master of expressionism, born in 1880 in Aschaffenburg – opposite the train station. “My painting is a painting of movement,” wrote Kirchner in his sketchbook from 1929/30. In his 1930 “Remarks on Life and Work” he recalled: “I was born at the train station. The first thing I saw in life were moving trains; I drew them when I was three years old. Maybe that’s why observing the movement particularly stimulates me to work.”
Diverse impressions
For Kirchner, Königstein remains a world in motion: examples of this are the painting “Bahnhof in Königstein” from 1916 and the oil painting “Autostraße im Taunus” from the same year. Kirchner stayed in Königstein because he was addicted to absinthe and tablets. The artist suffered his first breakdown in 1915, partly because of his military training in Halle and the constant fear of being deployed in the First World War. He later converted his Königstein impressions into oil, probably not until his time in Davos. Kirchner's impressions of Königstein and the surrounding area are diverse: paintings, drawings, diary entries, correspondence. But he didn't think much of psychiatrists; in his diary from July 1919 he wrote: “These psychiatrists are first-class abusers and deceivers. Juggling the spiritual is not difficult, but you corrupt people instead of saving them.”
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