Kirchner's impressive skill in composition and color reveals itself in “Sertigtal im Winter” (Sertig Valley in Winter), in which he captured the contours of the Swiss mountains on canvas with great aplomb. Kirchner composed this expressionist landscape with playful ease, using bold contrasts of green and blue tones, structuring it with accents of red, white, and violet applied in dynamic brushstrokes. The path that runs through the valley, bright and light, is divided into clearly delineated light and dark color areas by the rhythmically arranged long shadows cast by the tall trees. The stream meanders down into the valley, its waters foaming, while the evening sunlight of this late summer's day bathes the snow on the peaks in a mysterious, translucent violet glow.
The expressionist Kirchner is not concerned with the pure representation of a landscape impression, but with conveying his inner feelings to the outside world, using the landscape to express what lies deep within him, in keeping with the spirit of Expressionism, which aims at turning invisible feelings into form and color.
In 1911, Kirchner left Dresden, the city of origin of the artists' group “Brücke,” and moved to the bustling metropolis of Berlin. At that time, modern life in Berlin took off rapidly, with automobiles, telephones, over a hundred daily newspapers (some published several times a day), international press outlets, theaters, variety shows, dance halls, and international art exhibitions. Kirchner was fascinated by this enormous concentration of urban modernity, a vibrant nightlife, the milieu of dancers, and the marginalized characters of this lively but socially tense urban environment. During his Berlin years, Kirchner captured his impressions of the big city in nervous strokes on paper or canvas, ultimately creating his undisputed masterpieces with “Street Scenes” (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and “Frauen am Potsdamer Platz” (1914, Nationalgalerie Berlin). These works are considered icons of Expressionism today. Although Kirchner had never left Germany or Switzerland, he was a man of the world. Towards the end of World War I, Kirchner fled Berlin for the seclusion of the Swiss mountains. Suffering from a variety of anxieties since World War I and with an addiction to Veronal, morphine, and alcohol, Kirchner initially sought to find a suitable place for treatment in the soothing tranquility of the mountains after his sanatorium treatments. Even though he was far from the big city, the highly sensitive artist could not find peace. While his anxieties and fears persisted, he found the secluded, rugged mountain landscape a new source of inspiration for his vibrant expressionist paintings. It was precisely during this mentally stressful phase of his life that Kirchner produced works characterized by outstanding quality and intensity. In 1923, the then 43-year-old Kirchner moved into the small, modest “Haus auf dem Wildboden” at the entrance to the Sertig Valley near Davos with his partner Erna Schilling, a dancer he had met in Berlin. This solitude—for Erna often spent extended periods in Berlin—amid the mighty Swiss mountains was to be Kirchner's emotional refuge from a world that increasingly overwhelmed him. The sight of the Sertig Valley and the distant peaks was a view he enjoyed every day from his “Haus auf dem Wildboden” during those years, and our landscape in bold colors is equally inspiring thanks to the characteristic, expressive, nervous strokes that Kirchner used to depict the fir trees in dense green. In 1924, Kirchner had already captured this view of the valley from the same perspective in a watercolor and in the famous woodcut “Sertigstrasse im Winter” (Sertig Street in Winter). The painting “Sertigweg im Sommer” (Sertig Path in Summer), which features a very similar motif, also dates from 1924 and ranks among the artist’s highest auction prices. In the 1930s, when Kirchner's expressionist painting was suddenly branded “degenerate” by the National Socialist regime in Germany, Kirchner's view of the familiar landscape also changed. In 1937, many of Kirchner's works were removed from German museums as part of the “Degenerate Art” campaign, and his work was publicly ridiculed in the exhibition of the same name in Munich's Hofgarten, in line with the cultural policy of the “Third Reich.” This is another reason why Kirchner's view of the valley and the mountain panorama before him would be entirely different in 1937. In this painting, Kirchner captured the journey's destination— the metaphysical power of the eternal mountains —in a clear, fateful, and hopeful manner, using it as a kind of symbol of life on the canvas for the last time. In December 1923, Kirchner wrote to Gustav Schiefler from Switzerland: "I have never been indifferent to a subject I have dealt with. Never. I could not work on it if it did not also pose questions for me about a subject matter that has nothing to do with the technical treatment. [...] My hieroglyph is merely that a natural form is transformed into a line that does not depict said natural form, which is formed from the composition of the whole, the technique used, and the sensation and impulse triggered by the creative moment." (quoted from: Ernst Ludwig Kirchners Davoser Tagebuch, Wichtrach/Bern 1997, p. 240). [JS]