Kirchner and the Berlin Street

Street, Dresden 1908

Two Women on the Street 1918

 

Frauen auf der Strasse 1915

Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface.

Born from movement

One of the loneliest times of my life during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night.
- Kirchner

desperate, graphic, hungry
upward angles, looming figures
furious energy

In 1905, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Fritz Bleyl and two students named Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel founded the art group called “The Bridge”. The choice in naming was an interesting notion for an avant garde movement whose official motto was "…freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces…” because the “bridge” represented a link between the art of the past and the art of the future. They maintained a deep respect for the early traditions of Durer and Cranach, while forging the essentials of what would become one of the great movements in the 20th century—German Expressionism.

Kirchner was a leading painter of the expressionist movement and the forms and techniques seen in this remarkable collection comprise some of his greatest work with the female body. He twists this concept by turning most of these women into prostitutes on the streets of Berlin, but these paintings represent the darkest period in Kirchner’s life and perhaps an ominous prologue to the violence and anxiety of Germany on the brink of war.

The most obvious traits of Kircherner’s work at this time is the violence of his brush and pen strokes. This is not the same madness of a Dekooning, in that the faces and bodies are rarely deconstructed, but the chins taper into points, the women’s collars soar in giant arches, their necklines hang like daggers and the muted and the anonymous faces of black-suited men troll the backgrounds. There is an explosive quality to the composition of these works which is inherent in the brushstrokes and in the colors used. A canvas titled Two women on the Street unfolds from the center upward like a bomb going off. With their heads thrown back, their teeth are bared in what could be laughter or a shriek of terror. The blurred faces of men lined up in the background haunt the edges of the canvas and show the desperate ugliness of the men gathered on street corners. No one knows who these men are in Kirchener’s paintings, but for me they represent the sickness of the world and the emptiness found in pleasure at a time when the world was on the brink of disaster.

Ironically, these images are no less pertinent as reminders of the state of humanity in our own times. These are terrifying and deeply psychological paintings. Much has been written about these techniques, his hard lines, the jagged angles of the brushstrokes, etc. and these deeply psychological paintings are a reaction to his wandering the streets of Berlin at night, and a physical manifestation in paint of what must have been a violent sense of foreboding. The sexual element within this traumatic depiction of the metropolis adds to the sense of pure perversion in the images. These are paintings onto which a thousand messages and meaning can be attached, the most obvious being the alienation and sexual violence of Berlin before the war, the prostitutes as a symbol of the degeneration of love, the plight of women, the rapaciousness of men, and so on. But these are facile interpretations and can be reconstructed or destroyed in countless ways. The purely aesthetic triumph of these pictures is what is most interesting—the fact that Kirchner translated a visceral reaction to his time in Berlin through his paintings, that he managed to subvert the traditional depiction of the female form without betraying his gift and traditions, that his work was revolutionary because he found himself in a historical and personal moment which left no other alternative—not because he felt that would bring him fame or money.

Art is the product of imaginative, unconventional, and sometimes suffering minds. Our current obsessions with conceptualism and consumerism, mass culture and fame, fall flat before these paintings that speak to us of something far more crucial to the human condition. I was struck by the durability of these images, as well as the honesty in execution, something that I find increasingly lacking in contemporary art.

Kirchner may not be necessarily classically "good" but his immediate passion and hunger- a desperation for portraying life- for giving himself life through art is apparent.
Looking at his works I feel the immense isolation and loneliness in his hands. His desperation to feel something, to feel life, to feel anything.

I just want to think, ha! so people come to this big city thinking that they'll feel more, when in fact, the city will suck them dry, demoralize them, turn them into apathetic, callous people. Numb. Was Kirchner searching, searching for something, anything to make him feel more human? Haunting places seemingly alive with movement in order to gain just a little life from them? What did he find? Did he find it? Did he gain life?

No, he enlisted in the army and eventually committed suicide on June 15, 1938.