Thematically restricted to Mountain Life, this exhibition ideally complements the Kirchner retrospectives in Washington and London in 2003, which concentrated on Kirchner's years in Dresden and Berlin, as well as the Davos and Stuttgart exhibitions of Kirchner's sculpure in the same year. The Basel exhibition aims not only to illustrate Kirchner's revitalization of the entire alpine genre, but also to make it clear that his profound experience of Switzerland's alpine environment brought his art to a new zenith.