In this artwork, how is the History and description discussed?
In the years 1925/1926, a stylistic change started to appear in Kirchner's work. In his depictions of people he tried more abstract approaches, while in his landscapes he pursued a precise representationalism without formal experiments such as the distortions painted earlier.It is not known for how long Kirchner worked on this painting and when he began the preparatory work. However, a draft sketch of the painting, which Kirchner made as earlier as 1924, has survived. This preparatory drawing was donated to the Kirchner Museum Davos from a private collection in Hamburg.The center of the painting depicts the railway viaduct of the Rhaetian Railway over the Landwasser river near Davos-Wiesen, a well-known structure of Alpine railway architecture. The structure had been completed in 1909, so it was still quite new when the painting was made. Kirchner depicts a view of the viaduct as seen from the south. Compared to Kirchner's earlier depictions of buildings and structures, which often showed distorted proportions and perspectives, this image is closer to reality. In his depiction, Kirchner pays attention to the lines of the bridge and precisely reproduces the parabolic construction of the main arch and the semicircular formation of the smaller arches. The colors of the picture do not correspond to reality, but to Kirchner's artistic conception.A red and white railway signal can be seen above the bridge on the left side of the painting, a so-called Hippsche turning disc. The signal was left as a memorial where its shown here, even after it was decommissioned in 1987, perhaps because Kirchner had immortalized it in this painting.While Kirchner, who had also a degree in architecture, initially focused on the landscape and its components, over the years the architecture there increasingly became part of the content of the painting, from which the current work is a typical example.
Kirchner Museum Davos Davos