Solo exhibition with the Jena Art Association. Kirchner makes new friends in Jena: Botho Graef and his friend Hugo Biallowons, Eberhard Grisebach (1880-1945), Karl Theodor Bluth, and Rudolph and Irene Eucken. He spends summer on the Fehmarn with Erna again.

The First World War begins; Kirchner and Erna return to Berlin. Kirchner reports as an "involuntary volunteer" to be artillery man.

Rhine River Bridge at Cologne
1914
Staatliche Museen
Berlin, Germany

In the first half of the year, he stays at the Königstein sanatorium the rest of the year in Berlin. During his third stay at the sanitorium he paints Fehmarn bathing scenes on the hallway of the pump room (destroyed after 1933). In the latter half of the year in Berlin, with Botho Graef in Halle, and in Jena.

First contact with Frankfurt art dealer Ludwig Schames.

At the end of the year he enters another sanatorium in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. Eberhard Grisebach in Jena and his mother-in-law Helene Spengler in Davos set up a convalescent stay in Switzerland.

Kirchner's first stay in Davos then he returns to Berlin for a solo show with the Jena Art Association.

The unexpected death of his friend and supporter Botho Graef on 9 April deepens Kirchner's crisis.

In early May he visits Davos for the second time. His doctor. Dr. Luzius Spengler, diagnoses addiction to the veronal and morphine, which Kirchner was given in the German sanatoriums.

Kirchner spends July and August in a cottage at Stafelalp above Frauenkirch, near Davos. He does his first paintings and woodcuts on subjects drawn from Alpine fanning life.

Despite his physical weakness, Kirchner does a large number of woodcuts, chiefly portraits of those who visit him or of other patients.

In summer he returns to the Stafelalp. There he does a series of woodcuts after Petrarch. In the autumn he rents "In den Lärchen" (The Larches), a house in Frauenkirch, and settles there.

He is gradually weaned from his morphine addiction by Helene Spengler (who reduces the dosage under instructions from her husband Dr. Luzius Spengler), and he finally manages to come off morphine in 1921.

Kirchner writes A Painter's Creed and makes the Absalom series of woodcuts. In December he makes the famous woodcut portrait of Ludwig Schames, which the Frankfurt Art Association distributes to members—Kirchner's only graphic work printed in a large edition.

In January, Kirchner's printing press reaches Davos from Berlin. He does his coloured woodcuts Moonlit Night in Winter and Pines. His major themes are now mountain life and landscape. He also carves furniture for his home, including a bed for Erna and two reliefs for the studio door.

In the autumn, he writes an essay under the pseudonym of Louis de Marsalle on his own drawings. It is not published until 1921 in the German periodical Genius. He illustrates Umbra Vitae, a collection of poems by Georg Heym (1887-1912) which is published in 1924.

Self with Cat
1919-1920
Harvard University Art Museums
Cambridge, MA, US