This has never been seen before: From 15 February to 3 May 2026, the Kirchner Museum Davos will present, for the first time, a comprehensive juxtaposition of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso. The exhibition brings together around 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from leading international museums and private collections. In doing so, a great wish of Kirchner’s is fulfilled almost one hundred years after his death in Davos.
“Kirchner and Picasso never met in person – yet their works shaped modernism like hardly any other two artists. The exhibition reveals their contrasts as well as surprising points of closeness, and Kirchner’s deliberate engagement with Picasso’s work,” explains curator Katharina Beisiegel, Director of the Kirchner Museum Davos. This dialogue forms the core of the exhibition.
A wish becomes reality
The starting point of the exhibition lies with Kirchner himself: “… that I expect an international exhibition where Picasso and I are to hang side by side,” he wrote in 1933. Almost one hundred years later, this vision is becoming reality for the first time. “Kirchner. Picasso” is conceived as a dialogue between two artists of almost the same age, working at the same time yet never encountering one another – and taking fundamentally different paths. The exhibition is an international cooperation project between the Kirchner Museum Davos and the LWL Museum of Art and Culture, Münster.
Two paths, one century
Berlin meets Paris. The metropolis meets the studio. Picasso shaped the Parisian avant-garde early on and revolutionised the visual language of modernism with Cubism. Kirchner developed his art within the circle of the artist group “Brücke.” He made the metropolis, the body, and movement central motifs, and after the First World War found new pictorial spaces in Davos. The exhibition traces both artistic paths across several decades.
Contrasts – and surprising affinities
The juxtaposition sharpens the eye. Thematic groups of works reveal shared concerns: in their handling of body and space, in their engagement with popular imagery such as the circus and variety theatre, or in their depictions of studio and living spaces. Motifs of the metropolis with its bright and dark sides are as much in focus as the motif of bathers as an image of freedom and joie de vivre. Despite their different attitudes, Kirchner and Picasso respond to similar historical upheavals – each with their own artistic language.
Kirchner’s view of Picasso – a key to his late work
Kirchner followed Picasso’s development closely and engaged with his work early and repeatedly – long before Picasso was first shown comprehensively in Zurich in 1932. The exhibition demonstrates how this engagement influenced Kirchner’s later work without compromising his independence. His late work thus appears not merely as a retreat into the mountain world, but as a conscious positioning within international modernism.
