"Then went to Munich, where I pretended to study architecture, as in Dresden, because my parents were against painting." This is how Kirchner described his professional training in a letter to Botho Graef in 1916. A short sentence in an otherwise extensive description of his career and the influences that made him an avant-garde painter. For Kirchner, it seems, the study of architecture was little more than a necessary imposition, that left no great mark on his development. Many of his architectural drawings from the years of his studies and his diploma thesis have survived to this day. The exhibition aims to bring this unknown side of the painter into focus and highlight Kirchner's architectural vision using his designs and sketches. To this end, we are showing selected paintings that reveal the extent to which architectural knowledge accompanied him in his compositions throughout his life.
“I then went to Munich where I pretended to study architecture, just as I had in Dresden, because my parents were against painting.”
The exhibition “I pretended to study architecture”: The Unknown Kirchner focuses on the painter and trained architect’s unknown side. Based on drafts and sketches from his student days, it highlights Kirchner's architectural gaze. At the same time, selected paintings and first-rate loans serve to show how his architectural expertise informed the development of his style and shaped his perspectival compositions.
When Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff joined forces to form the Brücke artists’ group on June 7, 1905, they not only shared an interest in art but also attended architecture school together. Having completed his final thesis just a month earlier, on April 30, Kirchner received his diploma with the grade “good” on July 1, qualifying him to practice as an architect. It is not a coincidence that the Brücke was founded between those two dates. Kirchner’s studies may be understood as a gesture of reassurance towards his middle-class parents, who wanted their artistically gifted son to pursue a legitimate profession. His parents had recognized their son’s artistic talent early on and encouraged him at a young age, even arranging for him to have private lessons in drawing and watercolor. In a letter to Will Grohmann dated July 8, 1925, Kirchner noted that he owed “much inspiration and technical expertise and skill” to a drawing teacher from his childhood. His training as an architect was supposed to channel Kirchner's artistic talent into a middle-class career.
The founding members of the Brücke had met at the Royal Saxon Technical University in Dresden, but besides Kirchner, only Fritz Bleyl graduated with a diploma. Throughout their lives, the Brücke artists didn’t believe their architecture studies were particularly important for their artistic careers, but the historical retrospective reveals how crucial their encounters were with architectural greats such as Fritz Schumann, the reform-minded co-founder of the Werkbund.For one thing, the group’s focus on craft skills and on revaluating so-called minor arts such as textile weaving or woodcarving arose from the contemporary context of an avant-garde architectural movement. Architectural drawing classes and exercises in geometry and ornamentation were also part of the curriculum, along with structural theory and mathematics. This contradicts the image of self-taught independent artists that the Brücke group liked to project, and it shows how important their studies were also for the perspectival compositions that Kirchner, in particular, mastered to perfection.
This is what “I pretended to study architecture” draws on. While previous presentations have focused on the history of architecture and Kirchner’s architectural work from his student days, this exhibition seeks to examine Kirchner’s artistic oeuvre for the influences of architectural style. His urban works from the Berlin period, now icons of pre-war city life, laid the groundwork for a sustained exploration of architecture in his work.
In addition to Kirchner’s technique of pictorial composition, which resulted in skillful multi-perspective views – as in Sertig Valley in Autumn (Sertigtal im Herbst), a key work from 1925/26 – the exhibition will also investigate his affinity for buildings and architectural history. Kirchner’s Davos period, in particular, reveals his specific consideration modernist architecture, as exemplified in Davos by the flat-roof architecture promoted by Rudolf Gabare. Kirchner repeatedly recorded such buildings in photographs, drawings and paintings, creating a direct dialogue with the vernacular residential architecture.
The artist’s two Davos residences, the “in den Lärchen” house and the Wildboden house, also were a focus, as he not only depicted them in numerous works but also furnished them in terms of a total work of art. Harking back to the Brücke period, Kirchner’s studios in his late work are more than just places to work: This is where life and work come together; they are places of interaction as well as a backdrop for his paintings.
Yet another focal point is Kirchner’s trip to Germany in 1925–26, which, for the first time in a long while, took him back to his hometown of Chemnitz and to Berlin. There, Kirchner was confronted with large factory buildings, whose smokestacks and clouds of smoke he turned into urban landscapes in the manner of his panoramic Alpine views. At the same time, he was influenced by the streets, which even at night were bright as day thanks to electric lighting. Along with the colorful neon signs, they gave rise to a new visual language characterized by rather garish colors and flattened forms that, used more boldly still after his return to Davos, made up Kirchner’s New Style.
Numerous architectural drawings from Kirchner's student days and his final thesis have come down to us. Their survival over such a long period that included his move to Switzerland suggest how important they were to the artist. We are showing a total of 95 drawings from the Kirchner Estate, plus the final thesis, a cemetery design, from the collection of the Kirchner Museum Davos (KMD). The hand-drawn works on paper display a high level of detail and offer insight into Kirchner’s thinking and imagination as an architect. The KMD collection also includes drawings for an exhibition hall in Karlsruhe from 1914, which are being restored and prepared for “I pretended to study architecture.” They are the only evidence of Kirchner’s intention to work as an architect after graduating.
The exhibition also includes loans of singular works in Kirchner’s oeuvre from museums in Switzerland and abroad, such as Alpine Kitchen (Alpküche, 1918) from the collection of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and Chemnitz Factories (Chemnitzer Fabriken, 1926) from Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz. Combined with major paintings from the KMD collection, such as the unique Mountain Studio (Bergatelier) from 1935, this is the first time that Kirchner's architectural paintings are assembled and presented in the context of this reading.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue with contributions by renowned authors. The volume will be published in both German and English.