Lot Essay
Strassenszene comes from the monumental series of street scenes which Kirchner painted in Berlin between 1913 and 1915 (including Gordon nos 362-370, 414v and 427). The importance of these paintings prompted Roman Norbert Ketterer to comment "his street scenes are among the most important achievements of 20th century art" (ed. R. N. Ketterer, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Drawings and Pastels, New York, 1982, p. 100).
In the Autumn of 1911, Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff moved to Berlin where two other members of Die Brücke, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller, were already living. Exposed to the richness and vibrancy of life in the capital city, the individuality of each artist gradually began to emerge out of the collective Brücke style. Kirchner's move to a more personal style, which reached its peak in the Berlin street scene pictures, led to the group's collapse in the Spring of 1913.
Arriving from Dresden, Kirchner was dazzled by the activity and glamour of the German capital. As George Grosz recalled: "In Berlin people were progressive...there was wonderful theatre, a gigantic circus, cabarets and revues. Beer palaces as big as railway concourses, wine palaces which occupied four floors, six-day [bicycle] races, futuristic exhibitions, international tango competitions'" (G. Grosz, Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein, sein Leben von ihm selbst erzählt, Hamburg, 1974, p. 94).
Following the dissolution of Die Brücke and his trip to Fehmarn in the summer of 1913, Kirchner began to work on his street scenes, which occupied him for the following fifteen months. Firstly, Kirchner would go out onto the streets, rapidly sketching in pencil the constant motion and immediacy of modern metropolitan life (see fig. 8). He then returned to his studio, initially at Durlacher Strasse 14, Wilmersdorf and from April 1914 at Körnerstrasse 45, Berlin-Steglitz, where he drew larger sketches in pen and ink and pastel (see fig. 7), before progressing to oils, working partly from memory.
"The year 1913 saw the full realization of Kirchner's mature artistic power... Kirchner's reaction to city life remained a mixture of fascination and horror. On the one hand he was drawn compulsively towards its seamy night life of whores, cabaret dancers and circus entertainment, but on the other hand he was overwhelmed by its artificiality and brutishness. This conflict eventualy resolved itself in a series of...street scenes, where the artist's extreme state of nervous tension and excitement communicated itself to the spectator in luridly unnatural colours and his edgy use of...brush strokes" (B. Herbert, German Expressionism, London, 1983, p. 83).
The present work is closely related to Strassenszene (G.414v) of 1913/14, recently acquired by the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden (fig. 5). Both paintings focus on the prostitutes who were a regular sight on the streets of Berlin, and a popular feature in Kirchner's images of the city. As Edward Lucie-Smith comments, "Kirchner was indeed producing some of his best work of this epoch, notably the hallucinatory Berlin street scenes featuring prostitutes which give a strong impression of the feverish atmosphere of the German capital just before and just after the beginning of the war" (E. Lucie-Smith, Lives of the Great Twentieth-Century Artists, London, p. 62).
A further similarity between the two paintings is the impressively clear compositional scheme which Kirchner has employed, taking the form of a 'W' spreading out towards the top of the works, succintly conveying the hustle and bustle of the frenetic city. Jill Lloyd has commented on Kirchner's street scenes, "the subject of these paintings is...the substitution of the individual by the crowd, which moves in an impersonal geometric formation, like a dense pack of live mannequins...The real friction and energy of the paintings comes from their combination of rational compositional geometry and powerful gestural brushwork, from their exaggerated colours set against sombre surrounds. In this way Kirchner conveyed both the regulation and the potential wildness of the city crowd" (J. Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity, London, 1991, p. 153).
Bernard Myers has commented of the present work: "the Street Scene of 1913 extends Kirchner's interest in the movement of the city, its people moving confusedly and carelessly along the streets...We are attracted by the powerfully sensuous appeal of the colors, the Gauguin (or, better, Munch) rose of the street, the yellow-green of the sidewalk, the green and blue people with green or reddish faces. This strength and tension of color has the function of isolating individual figures while effecting a dynamic design that holds the picture together in what Kirchner speaks of as 'closed composition'" (B. Myers, op. cit., 1952).
Myers continues: "under the influence of the metropolis - its tensions, its exciting life and its disparities in economic status - Kirchner's work becomes increasingly psychological. His added depth of feeling is evidenced in a new Rembrandtesque type of dynamic drawing and an almost convulsive painting which was to last until after the war. There appears a whole new series of street scenes, Fehmarn landscapes with and without bathers, portrait studies, interior scenes of all kinds, men and women erotically or symbolically combined... The richness of color and poetry of mood they represent [marks] a high point in the painter's production. Pictures like Nude Girls on the Shore (G.347), the 1913 Street Scene (G.365) and Sick Woman (G.298) are not only most typical of Kirchner's own work, but of expressionism as well" (B. Myers, ibid, 1952).
Strassenszene dates from the most fruitful phrase of Kirchner's preoccupation with the street scene theme. An eyewitness, Kirchner's friend and fellow artist Werner Gothein, recalled: "the street scenes originate preponderantly in February, March, April 1914" (in a letter to R. N. Ketterer dated 14 November 1960, see D. E. Gordon, op. cit, pp. 94 and 466). Donald Gordon was keen to identify those streetscenes which he felt were conceived and begun in 1914 (see D. E. Gordon, op.cit.). He identified five, which are the present work, Friedrichstrasse, Berlin (G. 367), in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Strassenszene (G. 414v), in the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden (fig. 5), Strasse mit roter Kokotte (G. 366) in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid (fig. 3) and Leipziger Strasse mit Elektrischer Bahn; Kleines Stadtbild (G. 368), in the Museum Folkwang, Essen. According to Gordon, Kirchner later returned to two of these major pictures to make improvements or additions. The present picture was worked on in 1922 as was the Thyssen picture in 1925. It is clear that the signature and date '1913' were added by Kirchner to the present work after 1914.
The present painting remained in the Artist's possession until his death in 1938. The picture was sold from the Artist's Estate at the Kunstverein St. Gallen exhibition in 1950, where interestingly it was exhibited alongside the Thyssen Strasse mit roter Kokotte (G. 366). Thereafter it has only been seen in public twice, at the memorable Kirchner exhibitions organised by the Zurich Kunsthaus in 1952 and by the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 1970.
Of the major Berlin street scenes, all but the present example belong to or are on view in public collections: the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (G. 362), the Brücke Museum, Berlin (G. 363, on loan), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (G. 364), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid (G. 366), the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (G. 367), the Museum Folkwang, Essen (G. 368), the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (G. 369), the Nationalgalerie, Berlin (G. 370, on loan), the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden (G. 414v), a recent acquisition, and the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal (G. 427).
Please note that this work is sold with the original gilded Kirchner frame which is also signed E L Kirchner.
In the Autumn of 1911, Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff moved to Berlin where two other members of Die Brücke, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller, were already living. Exposed to the richness and vibrancy of life in the capital city, the individuality of each artist gradually began to emerge out of the collective Brücke style. Kirchner's move to a more personal style, which reached its peak in the Berlin street scene pictures, led to the group's collapse in the Spring of 1913.
Arriving from Dresden, Kirchner was dazzled by the activity and glamour of the German capital. As George Grosz recalled: "In Berlin people were progressive...there was wonderful theatre, a gigantic circus, cabarets and revues. Beer palaces as big as railway concourses, wine palaces which occupied four floors, six-day [bicycle] races, futuristic exhibitions, international tango competitions'" (G. Grosz, Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein, sein Leben von ihm selbst erzählt, Hamburg, 1974, p. 94).
Following the dissolution of Die Brücke and his trip to Fehmarn in the summer of 1913, Kirchner began to work on his street scenes, which occupied him for the following fifteen months. Firstly, Kirchner would go out onto the streets, rapidly sketching in pencil the constant motion and immediacy of modern metropolitan life (see fig. 8). He then returned to his studio, initially at Durlacher Strasse 14, Wilmersdorf and from April 1914 at Körnerstrasse 45, Berlin-Steglitz, where he drew larger sketches in pen and ink and pastel (see fig. 7), before progressing to oils, working partly from memory.
"The year 1913 saw the full realization of Kirchner's mature artistic power... Kirchner's reaction to city life remained a mixture of fascination and horror. On the one hand he was drawn compulsively towards its seamy night life of whores, cabaret dancers and circus entertainment, but on the other hand he was overwhelmed by its artificiality and brutishness. This conflict eventualy resolved itself in a series of...street scenes, where the artist's extreme state of nervous tension and excitement communicated itself to the spectator in luridly unnatural colours and his edgy use of...brush strokes" (B. Herbert, German Expressionism, London, 1983, p. 83).
The present work is closely related to Strassenszene (G.414v) of 1913/14, recently acquired by the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden (fig. 5). Both paintings focus on the prostitutes who were a regular sight on the streets of Berlin, and a popular feature in Kirchner's images of the city. As Edward Lucie-Smith comments, "Kirchner was indeed producing some of his best work of this epoch, notably the hallucinatory Berlin street scenes featuring prostitutes which give a strong impression of the feverish atmosphere of the German capital just before and just after the beginning of the war" (E. Lucie-Smith, Lives of the Great Twentieth-Century Artists, London, p. 62).
A further similarity between the two paintings is the impressively clear compositional scheme which Kirchner has employed, taking the form of a 'W' spreading out towards the top of the works, succintly conveying the hustle and bustle of the frenetic city. Jill Lloyd has commented on Kirchner's street scenes, "the subject of these paintings is...the substitution of the individual by the crowd, which moves in an impersonal geometric formation, like a dense pack of live mannequins...The real friction and energy of the paintings comes from their combination of rational compositional geometry and powerful gestural brushwork, from their exaggerated colours set against sombre surrounds. In this way Kirchner conveyed both the regulation and the potential wildness of the city crowd" (J. Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity, London, 1991, p. 153).
Bernard Myers has commented of the present work: "the Street Scene of 1913 extends Kirchner's interest in the movement of the city, its people moving confusedly and carelessly along the streets...We are attracted by the powerfully sensuous appeal of the colors, the Gauguin (or, better, Munch) rose of the street, the yellow-green of the sidewalk, the green and blue people with green or reddish faces. This strength and tension of color has the function of isolating individual figures while effecting a dynamic design that holds the picture together in what Kirchner speaks of as 'closed composition'" (B. Myers, op. cit., 1952).
Myers continues: "under the influence of the metropolis - its tensions, its exciting life and its disparities in economic status - Kirchner's work becomes increasingly psychological. His added depth of feeling is evidenced in a new Rembrandtesque type of dynamic drawing and an almost convulsive painting which was to last until after the war. There appears a whole new series of street scenes, Fehmarn landscapes with and without bathers, portrait studies, interior scenes of all kinds, men and women erotically or symbolically combined... The richness of color and poetry of mood they represent [marks] a high point in the painter's production. Pictures like Nude Girls on the Shore (G.347), the 1913 Street Scene (G.365) and Sick Woman (G.298) are not only most typical of Kirchner's own work, but of expressionism as well" (B. Myers, ibid, 1952).
Strassenszene dates from the most fruitful phrase of Kirchner's preoccupation with the street scene theme. An eyewitness, Kirchner's friend and fellow artist Werner Gothein, recalled: "the street scenes originate preponderantly in February, March, April 1914" (in a letter to R. N. Ketterer dated 14 November 1960, see D. E. Gordon, op. cit, pp. 94 and 466). Donald Gordon was keen to identify those streetscenes which he felt were conceived and begun in 1914 (see D. E. Gordon, op.cit.). He identified five, which are the present work, Friedrichstrasse, Berlin (G. 367), in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Strassenszene (G. 414v), in the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden (fig. 5), Strasse mit roter Kokotte (G. 366) in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid (fig. 3) and Leipziger Strasse mit Elektrischer Bahn; Kleines Stadtbild (G. 368), in the Museum Folkwang, Essen. According to Gordon, Kirchner later returned to two of these major pictures to make improvements or additions. The present picture was worked on in 1922 as was the Thyssen picture in 1925. It is clear that the signature and date '1913' were added by Kirchner to the present work after 1914.
The present painting remained in the Artist's possession until his death in 1938. The picture was sold from the Artist's Estate at the Kunstverein St. Gallen exhibition in 1950, where interestingly it was exhibited alongside the Thyssen Strasse mit roter Kokotte (G. 366). Thereafter it has only been seen in public twice, at the memorable Kirchner exhibitions organised by the Zurich Kunsthaus in 1952 and by the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 1970.
Of the major Berlin street scenes, all but the present example belong to or are on view in public collections: the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (G. 362), the Brücke Museum, Berlin (G. 363, on loan), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (G. 364), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid (G. 366), the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (G. 367), the Museum Folkwang, Essen (G. 368), the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (G. 369), the Nationalgalerie, Berlin (G. 370, on loan), the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden (G. 414v), a recent acquisition, and the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal (G. 427).
Please note that this work is sold with the original gilded Kirchner frame which is also signed E L Kirchner.