Mountain Landscape with Fir Trees

1918

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see jagged fir trees clawing up a steep mountainside, their dark shapes slashing across the paper like broken glass. Kirchner painted this while recovering in the Swiss Alps after a breakdown. The rough, hurried lines aren’t just trees—they’re how he felt, raw and unsteady. He didn’t paint the scene from above; he stood inside it, as if the mountain was part of him. Look up *impasto*—a technique where paint is piled thickly, but here, Kirchner did it with ink and graphite.