Potsdamer Platz (painting)

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Potsdamer Platz (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)
Potsdamer Platz
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , 1914
Oil on canvas
200 × 150 cm
New National Gallery, Berlin

Potsdamer Platz is the title of a large-format painting from the cycle of street scenes by the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from 1914. In a midnight scene, it shows two elegantly dressed cocottes , as the prostitutes were called in Berlin who were for clients on a traffic island Posing Berlin Potsdamer Platz . Art history regards it as the main work of Kirchner's Berlin pictures with street scenes from the time before the First World War . It has been on display in the new Berlin National Gallery since 1987 .

History, image content and provenance

The picture is in portrait format 200 × 150 cm. It was in discreet private ownership for many years, came on loan to the Berlin National Gallery in 1987 and was finally purchased in 1999. The work was exhibited at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1918, at the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 1958 and in Raleigh , USA. It could be seen at the documenta II in Kassel, in Paris, in Düsseldorf and in 1963 in the Darmstadt exhibition Testimonies of Fear in Modern Art . It followed in London in 1964, and in 1979 in Berlin and Cologne (exhibition on the occasion of Kirchner's 100th birthday). In the 1990s the work was shown in Madrid and Düsseldorf.

Kirchner's picture is one of the so-called Berlin street scenes , a series of pictures that were taken after he moved from Dresden to Berlin in 1913 and 1914. It shows a midnight situation on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin with numerous figures depicting passers-by and moving in different directions. The men wear black clothes and three women are dressed in pink. In the foreground of the painting on a kind of traffic island, which can also be understood as a presentation plate shown in a very slanted perspective , from which one can easily slip, stand close together two elegantly dressed women from the demimondra, prostitutes who are ready for initiation. The red-haired woman on the left poses as a war widow dressed in black with a face veil, which suggests that the figure was not completed until after the start of the war in August 1914 and is shown in profile. The one on the right is wearing a Prussian blue dress and is shown en face . Both are wearing high-heeled black shoes. The blue-clad woman seems to give her colleague a little nudge with her right foot, she should probably step aside. The proud pose of the women is enhanced by the extravagant hats and the dismissive, mask-like facial expression of the narrow faces. The male figures in the background are possible suitors who will cross the street to establish contact. In the background of the picture you can see the Potsdamer Bahnhof , whose clock shows midnight. On the left edge of the picture is an amusement palace with the then well-known meeting point Café Piccadilly, which later became the Fatherland House .

The two women are the night club dancers Erna Schilling and her sister Gerda, Kirchner's Berlin friends, with whom he lived in a three-way relationship. They are shown almost life-size in the large-format painting. Kirchner therefore recommended hanging the picture near the ground. The environment and background with the other figures appear disproportionate and distorted. The theme of the work is not the place, but the relationship between the figures. The men placed on the left and right of the women with their legs apart form the connection between the foreground and background of the painting. One of the men, the one who approaches the women from the right, bears a resemblance to Kirchner's artist colleague Otto Mueller , according to Jens Bisky . His hat, which sits at an angle on his head, is supposed to point to the catastrophe in the air during the First World War: “The citizen still has his hat on. But soon he'll lose his hat and his head. ”The women turn away from the men, adorn themselves, which increases the erotic tension between the groups of figures intended by the artist. In this picture, the artist succeeds in creating an atmospherically nervous tension between the isolated and alienated individual figures, the architecture, the scene and their colors. The unreal red and pink tones, the radiant green tones of the road surface, can be explained by the high proportion of green in the old Berlin gas lighting, and the acute-angled composition with wedge-like, V-shaped tapering in the foreground create an aggressive element in the picture. In his retrospective entitled Das Werk (from 1925), Kirchner himself describes the composition of his street scenes as "non-representational sensations", and that "the feeling that lies over a city, how people compose in the crowd and move in lanes" , can be understood as a kind of “lines of force”. The painting was probably started in the spring of 1914, but was not completed until after the war began in August. There is a woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that shows a similar scene reversed. The American art historian and specialist in German Expressionism, Donald E. Gordon, writes in his critical directory of Kirchner's works that in this picture the architectural background of Potsdamer Platz appears strongly for the first time , can be precisely determined and therefore it comes earlier Kirchner's usual distortions of space and size can achieve an exciting maximum of dreaminess and abnormality.

Charcoal drawing (1914)
Woodcut (1914)

The War Widow: Social Need and Prostitution

According to the Marburg art historian Hyang-Sook Kim, the portrayal of the left woman as a war widow has a special meaning in this painting by Kirchner. Prostitutes who identified themselves as widows after the Franco-German War in 1870/1871 were better protected from police reprisals. The war widow stands on the one hand for the social obligation to mourning and abstinence, but on the other hand, as a young woman who lost her husband in the war, she deserves to earn money due to her poor economic situation - pensions were paid according to rank, not according to the duration of the war service of livelihood, definitely also through prostitution. She is sexually available again and is thereby degraded to the object of the opposite sex. In this picture, the head veil looks like a cage, which suggests that Kirchner intended to make clear to the viewer of this picture the contradictions of society at that time, in which on the one hand social grievances could drive war widows into prostitution, but on the other hand women mourn had to wear, and were not allowed to display provocative clothing, poses or gestures. The widow's veil is used in patriarchal society to control female sexuality. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's view of women, driven by emotions, does not only reduce them in this picture to his “carriers of feelings”. Here, above all, his overstretched inner soul manifests itself particularly clearly. 1914 was a special year for Kirchner, it seemed that after the dissolution of the Brücke artists' association he would also be successful in the art world alone, but the First World War put an end to his hopes. Kirchner increasingly developed a fear-related nervousness that could later even be described as pathological. In 1915 he signed up for the military "voluntarily involuntarily", but he was unable to overcome his personal crisis, it rather led to a change in his image of women from the fiction of an ideal coexistence to negative feelings that demonized women and above all who led whores.

literature

  • Donald E. Gordon: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With a critical catalog of all paintings. (from the English by Lucius Grisebach) Prestel, Munich 1968, OCLC 18034159 , p. 100 ff.
  • Will Grohmann : The work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. K. Wolff, Munich 1926, OCLC 3981265 , p. 34.
  • Roland March: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Potsdamer Platz 1914 (= Patrimonia. 195.) Kulturstiftung der Länder, Berlin 2000, OCLC 646539075 .
  • Hyang-Sook Kim: The depictions of women in the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: the painter's hidden self-confessions. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2002, ISBN 3-8288-8407-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Magdalena M. Moeller : Peak of Expressionism: Kirchner's Berlin Style of the Years 1911–1914. In: Magdalena M. Moeller (Ed.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints; an exhibition on the 60th anniversary of death…. Hirmer, Munich 1998, p. 30.
  2. ↑ Magdalena M. Moeller: Peak of Expressionism: Kirchner's Berlin Style of the Years 1911–1914. In: Magdalena M. Moeller (Ed.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints; an exhibition on the 60th anniversary of death…. Hirmer, Munich 1998, p. 33 f.
  3. ↑ picture index of art and architecture. Accessed on May 23, 2016 (Please enter “Potsdamer Platz Kirchner” in the search mask).
  4. ^ Kolja Kohlhoff: The Old and The New National Gallery Berlin. Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89479-134-9 , p. 14 f.
  5. ↑ Jens Bisky: Barricades and Cafés. In: art - the art magazine . Issue 05/2009 (online)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.art-magazin.de  
  6. ^ Exhibition catalog of the Berlin National Gallery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Berlin 1979, p. 194 ff.
  7. ^ Donald E. Gordon: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With a critical catalog of all paintings. Munich 1968, p. 100 ff., P. 327.
  8. ^ Hyang-Sook Kim: The depictions of women in the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Hidden self-confessions of the painter. Dissertation, Marburg 2002, pp. 140 ff.
  9. ^ Lucius Grisebach: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Großstadtbilder. 2nd Edition. Munich 1989, p. 55.
  10. ^ Eberhard Kornfeld: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Tracing his life. Catalog Kirchner House. Davos, Bern 1979, p. 337.