Kirchner's Berlin street scenes at MOMA in New York

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was the foremost member of Die Brucke (The Bridge), the young group of German Expressionists who, like their French counterparts the Fauves, transformed European fine art at the beginning of the 20th Century. Their mutual master was Van Gogh, whom they excitedly discovered after his death, and whose bold use of line and color liberated them from the constraints of realism and Impressionism alike.

Both Die Brucke and the Fauves depended on precise and faithful redactions of the observed world. If realism aimed to produce that world in space, Impressionism aspired to do so in time. Much as these two schools differed from each other in their means and ends, they shared an underlying commitment to the idea of reproduction. This explanation simplifies much that was complex in both traditions, but it does capture the ideological consensus they shared: that the task of art was to represent empirical reality.

In this sense, European art was a century behind its philosophy, which after Kant had conceded that the “real” world was unknowable as such, and that what humans perceived was the construct of their sensory and intellectual apparatus. Impressionism was in effect a nod in this direction, as was the fascination with optics that characterized many of its practitioners.

Not what they saw, but what they felt

Expressionism, on the other hand, might be seen to have taken its cue from Marx’s dictum that the task of philosophy was not to understand the world but to change it. The Impressionists took for themselves the freedom of depicting not what they saw but what they felt. After all, if the world wore the color of human perceptions, why should it not wear the color of human emotions as well?

The Brucke artists were originally as interested in personal as artistic liberation; indeed, the two went well, if not necessarily together. Casual sex, nude bathing and other pleasures of the Bohemian life— old hat in Paris but new in imperial Germany— were frequent motifs in Kirchner’s early graphic work, which proposed to depict, in his words, the “free drawing of free individuals in free naturalness.”

Some of the early nudes in the current MOMA exhibition of “Kirchner and the Berlin Street” have a monumental quality reminiscent of Matisse (and, at a further remove, of Durer). But a characteristically spiky line soon develops, as in Seated Female Nude (c. 1912), a feast of pastel anchored by a brown swatch of pubic hair. A mysteriously garbed female figure to the nude’s left suggests a hidden narrative, as in the contemporaneous drawings of Egon Schiele. (Setting the prewar graphic work of these two masters side by side would make for a marvelous show, incidentally.)

Disillusionment with the female form

One street scene painting from Kirchner’s early years in Dresden, very reminiscent of Edvard Munch, suggests the sense of anxiety and anomie he was soon to discover in Berlin, where he took up residence in 1911. Another pastel, Standing Nude (1912-14)— with its stylized pose, its severe, rather sour expression, and its completely unabashed presentation of self— points also to a more critical, disillusioned stance toward the female form and the sexual idealism identified with it.

But it was in the seven monumental “Berlin Street Scene” paintings of 1913-15, gathered together here for the first time in New York, that Kirchner proposed a new and sinister mythology of the modern metropolis. These scenes are dominated by elaborately dressed and plumed prostitutes and the top-hatted gentlemen who are their actual or potential johns. There is enormous sexual tension in these canvases, but at the same time a sense of the radical impossibility of any discharge; these fantastic, hieratic female figures, notionally available to anyone with the price of their wares, in fact seem utterly unapproachable.

The point is only underscored by Street, Berlin (1913), which shows two prostitutes chatting companionably amid a swirl of tense male figures, one turned toward a display window as if deliberately ignoring the reality around him. In the other paintings, however, although female figures are often paired, they suggest no contact, let alone intimacy with each other: Each is entirely in her own self-enclosed space.

Calling Dr. Freud

Altogether, the suite is a stunning commentary on the deformation of that “free naturalness” Kirchner had pursued only a few years earlier, and the sexual commoditization with which modern urban life had replaced earlier forms of repression. What Freud might have made of these works, which were contemporary with his own mature writings, can only be conjectured, but they are deeply illustrative of them.

The MOMA show assembles many of the preliminary sketches and notebooks for the paintings— independent works of art in their own right that frequently capture a pulse of life that is, of necessity, frozen and abstracted in the finished suite. You won’t see a more perfectly realized work of art than the female bust with hat displayed in Notebook 149, a sketch dashed off in pencil, probably in no more than seconds. The dialogue between the sketches and the paintings, between swift observation and deep reflection, is the joy of the show.

As an ensemble, Kirchner’s Berlin street scenes represent one of the great achievements of German art, and a sobering commentary on the nature and cost of high civilization. Imperial Germany itself had only a few years to live; its successor, the Weimar Republic— even more mordantly depicted in the work of Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Otto Dix and others— would eventuate in Nazi Germany.

Mocked by Hitler

Kirchner’s work, stripped from the walls of German museums and other collections, would be mocked in Hitler’s notorious 1937 exhibition of “decadent” art, and much of it destroyed. Kirchner himself, who never fully recovered from his battlefield experience in World War I, would commit suicide the following year.

Could he have known how presciently his street scenes would prophesy a coming age of destruction, and of how close to the abyss German society already was? They remain no less a prophecy for us.