The best thing to come out of Davos

Another new year and once again the world’s leading CEOs and politicians descend on Davos, transforming this little Alpine town into the world’s most (self-) important talking shop. Yet there’s another side to Davos that’s far more interesting than dry geopolitical debate. Long before it became a stage for the World Economic Forum, this quiet corner of the Swiss Alps was the home of one of the most brilliant figures in modern art. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent his last 20 years in Davos. The town features in many of his finest paintings. It’s the only place with a museum devoted to his work. The Kirchner Museum in Davos is a striking piece of modern architecture, a Rubik’s Cube of glass and concrete bathed in natural light. The setting is spectacular, framed by a ring of snowcapped peaks, but the best thing is its contents, the world’s biggest Kirchner collection, about 3,000 works, including numerous paintings of Davos and the mountains that encircle it. His legacy isn’t confined to this museum. A walk around the town, and the surrounding hills and meadows, doubles as a timeline of his troubled life. Kirchner was born in Germany in 1880  into a conventional bourgeois family. He studied architecture in Dresden but his passion was always art. With several fellow students he founded Die Brücke (the Bridge), a radical ensemble who more or less invented German Expressionism. Vivid and unsentimental, their work was a sensation — and Kirchner was the leader of the pack. In 1913 he moved to Berlin, and his art became even more dynamic. His self-portraits were unflinching. He lived the life he painted. His nudes and femmes fatales were infused with erotic candour. Then Germany went to war, and his hedonistic world fell apart. Kirchner volunteered for the artillery but he suffered a nervous breakdown and wound up in a sanatorium in Davos — the same sanatorium that inspired Thomas Mann’s classic novel The Magic Mountain (the cold dry air in Davos was believed to be therapeutic — especially for people suffering from TB).