Berlin street scene

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Berlin street scene (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)
Berlin street scene
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , 1913
Oil on canvas
121 × 95 cm
New York Gallery , New York City

Berlin Street Scene is the title of a painting from the cycle of street scenes by the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from the years before the First World War up to 1915. The series depicts cocottes with their suitors; this picture was taken in Berlin in 1913. The series is considered one of the most important works of Expressionism. After restitution proceedings, the picture has been in New York's Neue Galerie since 2006 .

Image description

The picture is made using the technique of oil painting on canvas. It has the dimensions 121 × 95 cm. For the provenance of the picture, see Causa Kirchner .

In the foreground of the picture, the viewer recognizes two suitors in front and back views. Kirchner's artist friend Otto Mueller often served as a model for the clients . But it is also possible that Kirchner tried to portray himself. The two cocottes represent the sisters Erna and Gerda Schilling. The women are shown in very striking and colorful clothes with elaborate lace collars and highly fashionable hats. They appear against the backdrop of a crowded street. You look challengingly at the two men in the foreground. The suitors react to this by emphatically looking away or turning their heads. In the background you can see a crowd, a horse-drawn carriage and the sign for tram line 15, which ran through the center of Berlin via Hallesches Tor, Anhalter Bahnhof, Potsdamer Bahnhof and Brandenburg Gate. According to the American art historian Donald E. Gordon , the editor of the annotated Kirchner catalog raisonné, it is a horse- drawn two- horse tram . The detail and momentary character of the work is emphasized by the cut foreground figures of the men. The man standing on the right looks out of the picture as if he wanted to draw the viewer's attention to the picture. Donald E. Gordon suspects that the two male passers-by with hats in the foreground of the painting are one and the same person who Kirchner depicted in two different stages of movement, which indicates the influence of Futurism on Kirchner and creates a stroboscopic effect . As in the other street scenes, he used architectural elements to depict the character of a big city. Here, however, they were limited to two ogival house entrances in the upper background of the picture. In earlier pictures he arranged the feet of the figures in the shape of a diamond , here it is only the heads of the four main characters. Kirchner wrote that this basic geometric shape becomes “life and movement”. he also wrote that "arousal as well as the mind" were necessary for this image to emerge.

Interpretation and reception

In the picture, influences of the Italian futurists can be seen, such as the speed and dynamism in the work. The angular design language is based on Cubism. The artist became aware of Futurism through an exhibition in Herwarth Walden's gallery Der Sturm , which took place from April 12 to May 21, 1912.

Kirchner himself lived a deliberately bohemian lifestyle in which the transitions between entertainment such as vaudeville, tinkering and prostitution were fluid.

Kirchner noted: "They (the street scenes) were created in the years 11-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, in which excruciating unrest drove me out again and again day and night into the long streets full of people and cars."

Like many Expressionist poets, Kirchner also dealt intensively with the subject of prostitution and the relationship between prostitutes and suitors. However, he did not try to exercise social criticism with his pictures, but processed his idea of ​​a new independent type of woman. In these women, the artists of Expressionism saw the typical representatives of big city life and as people who existed outside of bourgeois life on the fringes of society, who were attractive as a topic for their work, some of which went beyond eroticism to pornography.

Causa Kirchner

In 2006, Anita Halpins, the granddaughter of the Jewish art collector Alfred Hess, requested the publication of the painting, which had previously been exhibited in the Brücke-Museum Berlin . The publication was approved by the Senate for Culture. Then the picture was auctioned at Christie's auction house for 30 million euros and then moved from the private property of Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky to the inventory of the Neue Galerie in New York. The legal basis for the return was the Washington Declaration signed by Germany in 1998 , in which Germany undertook to return paintings confiscated during the Nazi era to their rightful heirs. The public reaction to the release was very negative. It was generally doubted that Alfred Hess's widow had sold the painting out of compulsion. The family got into financial hardship after the Great Depression in 1929 and therefore the sale was interpreted by many as a reaction to the change in the financial situation. However, the circumstances surrounding the sale have not been finally clarified. Thekla Hess had sent the painting to the Kölner Kunstverein in 1936. There it was sold to the art collector Carl Hagemann under unexplained circumstances . Nonetheless, many doubted that the Washington Declaration would work here. The sale would have had nothing to do with the persecution of Jews. In addition, the Washington Declaration should not have been legally binding and the surrender should not have been enforceable, which is why there was no compulsion to do so. There were reports against Berlin politicians for infidelity connected with the publication. However, the Berlin public prosecutor's office refused to start the investigation because they did not consider criminal liability to be given. The support group of the Berliner-Brücke-Museum describes the process as a scandal and demands the return of the painting.

literature

References and comments

  1. ↑ cf. Magdalena M. Moeller : Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The street scenes 1913–1915. Munich 1993.
  2. ↑ A questionable description, because at the time the picture was taken, there were no more horse trams in Berlin.
  3. ^ Piper Gallery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Großstadtbilder . R. Piper & Co. Verlag Munich, Kempten 1979, ISBN 3-492-02501-3 , p. 15 .
  4. ^ Donald E. Gordon: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With a critical catalog of all paintings. Prestel Verlag Munich 1968, p. 97 f.
  5. ↑ a b Kirchner's "Berlin Street Scene". In: The world . WeltN24 GmbH, May 4, 2007, accessed October 1, 2016 .
  6. ^ Magdalena M. Moeller:  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The street scenes 1913–1915.  Hirmer, Munich 1993,  ISBN 3-7774-6190-3 p. 21 ff.
  7. ↑ Press release of the Senate Department for Science, Research and Culture, from August 17, 2006: artnet.de (PDF; 38 kB) accessed on May 8, 2009
  8. ↑ Spiegel online May 30, 2007. Press release of the Förderkreis Brücke-Museum from March 13, 2008: fkbm.org , both accessed on May 8, 2009
  9. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau, August 1, 2008: Berlin street scenes in New York , viewed December 27, 2019.