“Sunday of the Mountain Farmers”: Valuable painting from the Cabinet Room goes on tour

Berlin. A valuable painting from the Federal Chancellery is traveling. The painting "Sunday of the Mountain Farmers" by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) is to be shown at an exhibition in Bern, Switzerland. Experts removed the work from the Cabinet Room in Berlin under tight security measures.

The four-meter-long oil painting was hoisted over the terrace into the courtyard by crane, as the Kunstmuseum Bern announced. The work will be on display in the exhibition "Kirchner x Kirchner" from September 12th. It will be shown there for the first time alongside Kirchner's work "Alpine Sunday. Scene at the Fountain."

The painting is lifted from the Federal Chancellery by crane. It normally hangs in the Cabinet Room.

Source: Fabian Sommer/dpa

"The two paintings opened Kirchner's retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1933, side by side, which he himself curated and which the Kunstmuseum Bern now commemorates," the statement read. "Although conceived as counterparts, the two monumental paintings have never been seen together again since 1933."

The Nazis had defamed works by the expressionist painter Kirchner as "degenerate art." He also created, for example, the painting "Berlin Street Scene."

His painting "Sunday of the Mountain Farmers" has hung in the cabinet rooms of German governments for many years. A temporary loan from Switzerland, "New Stars" by Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985), is on display in the Federal Chancellery as a replacement.

RND/dpa