After training as a printer and graphic artist, Erich Erler went to Paris in 1896 to gain a foothold as a writer and correspondent for a daily newspaper. As he fell ill with tuberculosis, he went to the Engadin for a cure in the sanatorium of Dr. Oskar Bernhard, art collector and admirer of the Italian-Swiss painter Giovanni Segantini. Impressed by the mountain landscape and Segantini's works, Erler began to paint. With brief interruptions, he stayed in the Ebgadin village of Samaden until the outbreak of the First World War, He added the place’s name to his own to appreciated his "gratitude for the mountains" as they helped him to recover. Some time earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche had already retreated to the seclusion of the Engadin, and in the mid-1920s, Thomas Mann immortalized the region in literature with his work "The Magic Mountain".
Erich Erler was one of the founding members of the artist group "Die Scholle" in Munich in 1899, where he temporarily set up a studio, and produced prints for the magazine "Jugend". His landscapes of the Engadin, which make up the majority of his motifs, are clearly influenced by Segantini's divisionist painting style and color scheme and a symbolistic pictorial language. His figures are clearly delineated against the wide background and radiate a statuesque, motionless monumentality in the otherwise deserted pictorial space. A certain pathos cannot be denied in the figure of the lonely shepherdess, presented in heroic isolation in harmony with the stillness and sublimity of nature, the gaze directed towards the infinite sky. The protective, decelerating The Alpine landscape with its slower pace of life, may have seemed like a magical realm to Erler, who had fled Paris to escape his illness, as he depicted the mountain world world of the Engadin, at a when it was still far from mass tourism, in a cosmically moving brushstroke. In 1906, he showed thirteen paintings in the 25th exhibition of the Vienna Secession together with artists from the "Scholle". This makes it all the more clear how worthwhile a comprehensive art-historical appreciation of Erich Erler in the context of Symbolism and renewed Alpine painting at the beginning of the 20th century would be. [KT]