BERN.- A major work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers), is about to leave the Federal Chancellery in Berlin. The painting is known to a wide public because almost every evening it has been visible on the television news in the background of the German government’s Cabinet sessions.


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Exceptionally, it is now being allowed to leave its customary place, to appear as a guest in the Kunstmuseum Bern. For the first time since its joint exhibition with its pendant, Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well) in 1933, the two paintings will be shown together, reunited, in the autumn exhibition Kirchner x Kirchner in the Kunstmuseum Bern, where they will form the sensational highlight of the exhibition.

Kirchner x Kirchner: A homage to Kirchner’s biggest retrospective in 1933.

Between 12 September 2025 and 11 January 2026, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the exhibition Kirchner x Kirchner. It features around 65 top-class works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) which are rarely shown in Switzerland. The artist is considered as one of the most outstanding protagonists of modern art. With this exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Bern is recalling the largest retrospective in the artist’s lifetime, held in the Kunsthalle Bern in 1933 and curated by the artist himself.

Kirchner’s monumental pair of paintings reunited as a highlight of the Kirchner x Kirchner exhibition thanks to a sensational loan from Berlin.

One particularly highlight of the 1933 exhibition was the presentation of the monumental pair of paintings Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers) and Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well). They were hung in the entrance hall of the Kunsthalle, where they formed a dramatic introduction. The artist made these two works as a unit in the mid-1920s in Davos, where he had been recovering from service in the First World War since 1917, and both the landscape and the life of the mountain farmers inspired him to explore new motifs.

‘I also already have an idea for the exhibition. Both 4 m paintings should go in the entrance hall. The rear wall of the lantern light room is hung with 8 [eight] 75 x 150 formats. That provides a calm horizontal as an introduction, and when one looks through the door there are only the verticals of the portrait formats. A wonderful harmony on the right and left the big wooden figures of Adam and Eve.’ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, letter to Max Huggler, former Director of Kunsthalle Bern, 21 December 1932.

Today it’s a genuine sensation that the Kunstmuseum Bern is able to show, reunited after more than 90 years, the two oil paintings Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers) from the Cabinet Room of Berlin’s Federal Chancellery and its pendant Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well) (press image 02) from its own collection.

‘The Federal Republic of Germany is doing the Kunstmuseum Bern a very great honour by exceptionally authorising the loan of this significant work by Kirchner. It makes us extremely happy that we are enabled in to show these two major works together again to the public for the first time, entirely as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner intended.’ --- Nina Zimmer, Director, Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee

‘That these two works, of central importance for Kirchner’s work and sense of himself as an artist can no be shown together again for the first time – fully in line with his original intention – fills me with great joy and deep gratitude.’ --- Nadine Franci, Curator of Prints & Drawings at Kunstmuseum Bern and Curator of the Exhibition.

In exchange, for the duration of the loan, the Kunstmuseum is lending the painting Neue Sterne (New Stars) (1977-1982) by Meret Oppenheim, from its collection, to the Federal Chancellery. Meret Oppenheim is seen as the most significant Swiss woman artist of the 20th century, as well as the most important female representative of the Surrealist movement. Born in Berlin in 1913, she grew up near Basel in Southern Germany; her career, like Kirchner’s, thus connects Germany with Switzerland, and is also shaped by discrimination on the part of the Nazis. In her large-format painting the artist presents a kind of colourful, abstract interpretation of a starry sky.

Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well): an exceptional acquisition for the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern

After the 1933 exhibition the two works went their different ways. The Kunstmuseum Bern bought Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well) (1923-24/around 1929) directly from the 1933 Kirchner exhibition thanks to donations and a generous accommodation by the author. This purchase by the Kunstmuseum Bern meant much more to Kirchner than mere financial support – it was an overdue symbolic recognition. Until then he had not been represented by a painting in a single Swiss museum collection. In Germany his works were gradually disappearing from exhibitions, and were banished to storage.

‘I have now had the painting bought by the Museum on Tuesday: Scene am Brunnen (The Scene at the Well), delivered without accident to the place in the Museum that they indicated. [….] Now it will presumably be hung, and will hopefully bring pleasure to many people, just as it brought me pleasure to depict this peaceful, healthy life of our mountain peasants in the midst of their landscape. To be able to do so, I spent summer in the Alps with them every year for 6 years. --- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Letter to Johann Conrad von Mandach, Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern (1920-1943), Davos Wildboden, 27.4.1933

Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers): a symbolic sign from the Federal Republic of Germany as reparation and for peace.

The journey of the counter-loan Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers) led from the artist’s estate to the Federal Chancellery in Germany. The German Expressionists already found their way into the new Chancellery in Bonn under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. As a sign of reparation for the defamation that had taken place under the Nazis, and as a sign of peace, he had offices in the building decorated with works by Expressionist artists in 1975. The artworks were loans from museums, from the Federation’s collection or from private collectors. Roman Norbert Ketterer, the administrator of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s estate, was friends with Helmut Schmidt, and entrusted him with the large-format painting Sonntag der Bergbauern (170 x 400 cm) as a permanent loan. Helmut Schmidt had it displayed to commanding effect in the Cabinet Room, in the so-called Chancellor’s Building of the Bonn Federal Chancellery. The painting was purchased by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1985.

When the new Federal Chancellery went into operation in Berlin in 2001, the painting moved with it, finding a prominent and symbolic place in the Cabinet Room of the Federal Government.

Since the 1970s the painting has been present as a background to television reports from the German government before Cabinet sessions, and has entered the collective consciousness in that way. The juxtaposition of the two paintings brings to the fore once again that ‘image of calm and peace’ that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner already suggested in a letter to Nele van de Velde on 7 October 1921 – even before he started work on the painting. May it shine out upon our contemporary world.



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