Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, oil on canvas, 1908 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Key points:
- Street, Dresden emphasizes the dynamism of urban life in Germany in the early twentieth century, depicting the swirling crowds and electric lights of the modern city.
- It recalls the isolation and psychological angst explored by earlier nineteenth-century artists, but reflects the twentieth-century move toward greater expressionism in color and open brushwork.
- Kirchner and other Die Brücke artists were influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas about breaking apart morality and conventions in modern Germany.
Additional resources:
View this work in MoMA’s collection
Expressionism and city life from MoMAlearning
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
[flickr_tags user_id=”82032880@N00″ tags=”KirchnerDresdenStreet,”]
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:13] We’re looking at a painting at the Museum of Modern Art by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It’s “Street Scene, Dresden,” and it dates to 1908.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:24] Kirchner is known as an Expressionist artist. That’s his classification.
Dr. Zucker: [0:28] He would become part of a group called “Die Brücke.”
Dr. Juliana Kreinik: [0:32] Yeah, “The Bridge.”
Dr. Zucker: [0:32] The Bridge, as they called themselves.
Dr. Harris: [0:34] What did “The Bridge” mean? What was it a bridge to and from? From the past to the future?
Dr. Kreinik: [0:39] Well yes, from the past to the future, but it refers really directly to Nietzsche.
Dr. Harris: [0:45] Really?
Dr. Zucker: [0:45] I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that either. That makes it much more interesting. [laughs]
Dr. Kreinik: [0:48] “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” right. The bridge from civilization to the Übermensch. Crossing the bridge is a journey of self-discovery, of individual self-actualization.
Dr. Zucker: [1:02] There were so many German artists and craftsmen that were really interested in Nietzsche at this moment.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:07] Obsessed is a better word. Yeah.
Dr. Zucker: [1:08] Yeah.
Dr. Harris: [1:09] What was it about Nietzsche?
Dr. Kreinik: [1:11] Well, he was interested in taking apart ideas of morality, which constricted culture so much, I think all over Europe, but especially in Germany. The young artists — I think Kirchner was not even 30 at this point — they’re all pretty young and they’re really interested in renewal and the new and…
Dr. Zucker: [1:33] Germany was late in coming to the Industrial Revolution, right?
Dr. Kreinik: [1:36] Yes.
Dr. Zucker: [1:37] There’s a lot of change that’s happening in a very compressed time period.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:40] They, in the later 19th century, really tried to catch up to England and France, and they worked really hard to do that. There was a lot of growth really fast, but there were all these cultural mores that they worked really hard to break out of.
[1:53] Nietzsche was totally influential and inspirational because he posited all these ways of breaking out of this very constrictive…
[2:02] [crosstalk]
Dr. Harris: [2:03] …individual alone, accountable for…
Dr. Kreinik: [2:07] Yeah, so that you wouldn’t be proper and contained…
Dr. Zucker: [2:10] Even in this painting, there is a kind of isolation amongst those figures, isn’t there?
Dr. Kreinik: [2:14] Definitely.
Dr. Zucker: [2:15] Even though it’s a crowded, really dense scene. This is a pretty wild painting, really.
Dr. Harris: [2:22] I have to say I know that you like this painting.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:24] I do, I love this painting.
Dr. Harris: [2:25] I have always really not…
[2:28] [crosstalk]
Dr. Kreinik: [2:29] I love this painting.
[2:30] [laughter]
Dr. Zucker: [2:31] All right, so I want to hear from both of you then.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:33] Why? Why do you not like this painting?
Dr. Harris: [2:36] It feels very like a man looking at women on the street, and I know that they’re…I don’t know. I guess, for me, it doesn’t build all that much more on the 19th century, like Munch’s “Street Scene, Karl Johan Strasse.”
Dr. Kreinik: [2:57] Right. From 1892.
Dr. Harris: [2:58] That kind of interest in psychological angst and alienation in the modern world and using color to describe those things, and brushwork. As a Symbolist artist, I really like this.
Dr. Zucker: [3:14] So did the Germans, by the way. They really heroized him, right?
Dr. Harris: [3:18] They loved this. But then when we get to this and the colors become more garish and more difficult, the composition a little bit more disjointed, the brushwork more open, I’m not sure how much this adds. I guess there’s something uncomfortable to me about the way that he’s looking at the women here.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:33] For me, the color and the garishness is what attracted me to it. I love the distortion. I love the green. I love the orange. I love the orange tracing around the woman’s hat. It’s glowing. I just love looking at that. I feel like it’s neon.
[3:50] If you look again at the entire composition, I love things that pop out at different moments. I think it is about looking and it is about voyeurism and it is about the male gaze. If you look on the right side of the painting, I love that he’s cut halfway out of the composition.
Dr. Harris: [4:05] Degas did that in 1872.
Dr. Kreinik: [4:08] I think for me this feels very much about isolation and German angst.
Dr. Zucker: [4:15] The point you were making about Degas I thought was an interesting one, because in some ways France is going through those issues when Degas is painting, and Germany is a little bit later. That doesn’t make this not authentic, an authentic expression of that moment. I’m not saying that they’re the same thing.
[4:31] The issue of industrial alienation and the issue of urban alienation, I think, are both very important issues in both of those painters’ work, but this is clearly a 20th century work. There are lessons that have [been] learned in freedoms that have been generated from Post-Impressionism and from other artists. They’re taken to…
Dr. Kreinik: [4:48] I think of Fauvism.
Dr. Zucker: [4:49] Exactly.
Dr. Kreinik: [4:50] Just the coloration I think for me is something that makes it extremely like early 20th century.
Dr. Zucker: [4:54] But it’s not the beauty of Fauvism.
Dr. Kreinik: [4:56] No, it’s not.
Dr. Zucker: [4:57] This is really aggressive.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:02] It’s very — I like that.
Dr. Harris: [5:03] Van Gogh’s the “Night Café,” said…
[5:07] [crosstalk]
Dr. Harris: [5:07] He wanted to give “The Night Café” a sense of darkness and misery by means of red and green. That’s what Van Gogh said 20 or 30 years before this.
[5:20] He’s got that horrible pink color in that painting.
Dr. Zucker: [5:24] Maybe the power here is the very thing that you don’t like, which is the women as subject, right?
[5:28] [crosstalk]
Dr. Harris: [5:28] Well, I know that he’s doing images of prostitutes on the street, right? I guess that knowing that informs my looking at this painting and starts to make me worried about the way that modern historians look at these images.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:45] I think that because I think of his prostitute, the streetwalker scenes as five years later.
Dr. Zucker: [5:51] Those are in Berlin, right?
Dr. Kreinik: [5:52] He’s in Berlin. They’re in like Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichshafen, these main city centers that are a lot more strident and the women are definitely the focus of the male gaze and there are a lot of men kind of circling around the women. Those are less interesting to me, just even in terms of looking at the color and the composition for some reason, and I know that a lot of people like those more.
[6:15] His style is more developed and he’s more mature as an artist. I like that this is more raw. You know Kirchner, he’s focusing on that authentic, direct engagement with like the experience of the city, the electric — the movement.
Dr. Zucker: [6:29] A kind of constant shift and change here, as if all of those voids, that wonderful pink area, is constantly changing and shifting as the figures that define that space move, right?
Dr. Kreinik: [6:41] I feel like he’s experimenting with something.
Dr. Harris: [6:43] Could we see the women here as sympathetic in some way? Maybe if I wasn’t reading it through the guise of those later images of prostitutes on the street. She does look out at us. She’s lit by the lights of the city. When you said neon, I could feel those kinds of lights, maybe, in the dusk in the city.
Dr. Zucker: [7:04] That artificiality.
Dr. Harris: [7:05] She looks out at us and…
Dr. Kreinik: [7:08] Well, they don’t look to me, honestly, like prostitutes.
[7:10] [crosstalk]
Dr. Harris: [7:10] Right, no, I’m saying that they’re bourgeois women, but maybe there is something sympathetic about her if we don’t look at her through the lens of those later images.
Dr. Kreinik: [7:21] I think that there is. I guess to me that it just seems like these isolated figures, and that’s what attracts them to me. Like, it’s a theater. If you look at the side, there’s almost like a pillar figure of that male figure, kind of holding the picture together. It pulls your eye in.
[7:36] He’s right there, and he’s between you and the female figures. Then everything recedes behind that diagonally to the left, in the back, so you see the girl kind of in the center stage.
[7:46] [crosstalk]
Dr. Harris: [7:47] What makes it theatrical?
Dr. Kreinik: [7:48] I just feel like the lighting and the way that the figures are arranged kind of like they’re pawns.
Dr. Zucker: [7:53] That can almost be limelight coming in from below. What I love about it is, although it’s a city and you have the slightest trace of the trolley track, there’s no architecture. The entire space is defined by the occupation of these figures or their occupation in space.
[8:10] In a sense, it’s the city defined by these people, defined by space itself shaped by the changing crowd, which I think is an interesting idea. He’s not using buildings, he’s not even using intersections, he’s using people to define…
Dr. Harris: [8:26] To define what’s going on.
Dr. Zucker: [8:27] …the space, and in a sense to build a city out of the people who are…
Dr. Kreinik: [8:32] Out of the shifting masses. This is Koenigstrasse in Dresden, which is a main thoroughfare of shopping. There’s a lot of traffic and movement, and this is definitely part of a very well-known street in a very well-known area, and it’s very populated.
Dr. Harris: [8:47] In the second half of the 19th century, when artists painted street scenes like Degas, because this looks to me like he’s looking at Degas, but that there is more of a sense of architecture and place.
Dr. Zucker: [8:58] There’s nothing here that’s stable. Everything here will be different in a moment. There’s something wonderful about that.
Dr. Kreinik: [9:05] I think I like looking also at just that little girl and her big hat and her ugly kind of claw-like hand. I think she’s holding some kind of toy.
Dr. Zucker: [9:14] Or flowers maybe?
Dr. Kreinik: [9:15] Or flowers or something, but in the painting, it really looks scary.
Dr. Zucker: [9:21] There’s also the way that her legs are slightly swayed and there’s something very ungainly.
Dr. Kreinik: [9:26] Her hair is kind of dripping down the sides of her face.
Dr. Zucker: [9:29] Kind of inelegant, yeah. Actually, throughout the entire painting, there’s this really interesting tension between the effort and elegance in the dress, but then the ungainliness or the aggression of the representation, so there’s this wonderful back-and-forth.
[9:45] [music]
