The Kirchner Museum Davos offers the visitor the extraordinary chance to look at works of the expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the same place they were created. Davos and its environs were the artist’s inspiration for a large number of important pictures.
The “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Foundation Davos” is the governing body of the museum. In 1992, the Kirchner Foundation was able to acquire a large collection of the artist’s work, thanks to the generosity of Rosemarie and Roman Norbert Ketterer and the Benvenuta Family Foundation. Since then, the collection has been enlarged considerably thanks to a further bequest of the Benvenuta Family Foundation (1994) and other private foundations, the Baumgart-Möller Foundation among them. The collection includes over 1,400 drawings, graphic works, textiles and paintings, sculptures and sketchbooks. In addition the collection contains over 800 photographs, documents and an important library devoted to both Kirchner and Expressionism.
The Kirchner material is supplemented by numerous works by the artists Albert Müller and Fritz Winter, and by major works by Lyonel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Otto Mueller.
The Kirchner Museum, thanks to its superb exhibition and research holdings, permanently displays major works from the collection. In addition, it stages temporary exhibitions of Kirchner’s work, highlighting the era of Expressionism and related art movements. The collection includes representation of all the major themes which occur in Kirchner’s work; studio pieces, nude, circus scenes and portraits from the “Brücke” period through the late Swiss works are all exhibited in key works. The majority of pictures have their origins in Kirchner’s years in Davos. The viewer readily senses, not only that that the mountains deeply impressed the artist and that he felt kinship for her people, but that he was seeking an artistic expression appropiate to his own time.
The museum building is also a gift of the Benvenuta Family Foundation. It represents the first major commission of the Zurich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer. The sleek, nevertheless highly functional construction of glass, concrete, steel and wood make the building a marker for a new form of museum architecture.
Opening hours Open year round Tuesday to Sunday Christmas to Easter and 15.7. to 18.10.: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. otherwise: 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
