Die Klosterser Berge

Klosters is the village just over the pass north of Davos, where Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had lived since 1917. He painted its mountains around 1923, the year the Kunsthalle in Basel gave him his first large exhibition in Switzerland and young Basel painters began making the trip up to visit him. The canvas is square, well over a metre each way. A wooden hut with a blue roof sits low in the picture, the mountainside beside it is painted red, and pink clouds drift across a sky of green and yellow. The Belvedere points out the echoes. The jagged peaks come back in the spiky firs, and the curls of the clouds return in the pale pasture along the bottom edge. The Austrian state gallery in Vienna bought the picture in 1924 from Ludwig Schames, Kirchner's dealer in Frankfurt.