It's amazing that it took nearly one hundred years to round up all of German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin street scene paintings in one glorious exhibit. Organized by in-house curator Deborah Wye, Kirchner and the Berlin Street brings together seven of these masterpieces, along with approximately sixty works on paper that highlight Kirchner's interdisciplinary working methods. One of the founding members of the youthful Die Brücke collective, Kirchner moved to the newly bustling metropolis of Berlin in 1911 after spending most of his days in the quieter city of Dresden. Two years later, the Die Brücke artists bitterly disbanded and Kirchner entered a period he described as “one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.” From this emotional state, Kirchner began the now famous Berlin street series.

Painted between the years of 1913 and 1915, each uses the image of the prostitute as a larger metaphor for modernity, promiscuity, and rising tension in a society on the brink of world war. The dramatic and claustrophobic rendering of these seedy city-dwellers in sharp angular lines and exaggerated colors underscore the emotional frailty of Kirchner during this time. However, there is a certain amount of delight, mystery, and wonder one finds in these works, in addition to feelings of alienation. Berlin Street Scene (1913) is a good example of this, where two seemingly decadent women/prostitutes are out on the prowl, or what we call, "turning tricks." Their facial expressions and that of a passing male turned toward the viewer bear a peculiar expression of both interest and disgust.

Some critics believe that this man may be a self-portrait of Kirchner and that his unusually red lips matching those of the prostitutes in Berlin Street Scene represents the artist's identification with marginalized social status on the fringes of bourgeois society. Given the amount of time he spent over the course of two years on essentially just one subject matter, I'm inclined to agree that the prostitutes we see in these paintings are not much different than Kirchner the artist, roaming Berlin in anonymity with a sense of estrangement.

Images: Berlin Street Scene (1913); Street Scene (1914). Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.