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“Kirchner and the
Berlin Street,” opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, delivers
a terrific visual wallop right at the start and then continues to
reverberate.
Berlin Street Scene” (1913) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
The main event is a set of seven paintings by the
German Expressionist
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), produced from 1913 to
1915. Vigorously realized in jagged brushstrokes — lurid
pinks, greens and yellows and shades of charcoal black —
they depict stylishly dressed streetwalkers and furtive,
darkly cloaked men on the nocturnal, vertiginously tilted
streets of an infernal city. As represented in Kirchner’s
angular, semi-Cubist style, the prostitutes have mask like
faces and haughty, insectoid appearances. They resemble
praying mantises or queen wasps, and the men who lurk about
them are like anonymous drones.
Kirchner was not a gifted painter, but
his paintings have a bracing ugliness and a burning emotional
intensity. Looking at his claustrophobic pictures is like seeing
through the feverish eyes of a lost and tormented soul. Considered
among the most important achievements of Kirchner’s career, the
Berlin paintings are exhibited together for the first time here.
The hellish effect of the paintings is
amplified by their installation, conceived by Deborah Wye, the
Modern’s chief curator of prints and illustrated books. Rather than
hanging on four surrounding walls, the paintings are displayed side
by side, each on its own separate wall panel. As the outer panels
are slightly angled toward the center, the pictures converge, with a
hallucinatory you-are-there vividness, on viewers entering the
gallery.
The exhibition also includes about 60
drawings and prints, which tell much about Kirchner’s working
methods. He did not base his paintings on careful preparatory
drawings. Rather he filled notebooks with scribbly, often
indecipherable pencil sketches made while wandering the streets. In
the studio he created more fully formed pictures on paper and
canvas.
What is most interesting about these
works on paper is the biographical background they evoke. Dating
from 1908 to 1914, they coincide with a change from a time of
blissful beginnings in the company of close friends in Dresden to a
period of disconnection, depression and loneliness in the big city
of Berlin.
Kirchner trained as an architect to
please his parents but was determined all along to be a painter. In
1905, with the fellow students Fritz Bleyl,
Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, he founded an artists’
group called Die Brücke, or the Bridge. Influenced by
Van Gogh and
Matisse, medieval printmakers and the arts of the South Pacific,
the Brücke artists rejected academic conventions in favor of a
direct and spontaneous freedom of expression.
For about six years they enjoyed an
idyllic existence. Along with girlfriends and models they led a
carefree, communal life involving free love, indoor and outdoor
nudity and shared creative discovery. They were achieving their goal
of bridging the gap between art and life, and were finding support
from progressively minded collectors.
While few of the works on paper in
this show are very compelling as finished products, Kirchner’s
pre-Berlin drawings and prints of dancers, bathers and studio models
are infectiously animated by a back-to-nature primitivism and a
joyfully rebellious optimism.
The exhibition includes one large,
lushly colorful painting based on the Dresden years (also from
MoMA’s collection). Depicting fashionably dressed women, a little
girl and a crowd of shoppers on a bright pink street, it exudes a
slightly scary atmosphere that calls to mind artists like
James Ensor and
Edvard Munch. But it also has an expansive, sensuous beauty
missing from the comparatively harsh Berlin paintings.
Around 1911 the Brücke artists moved
to Berlin, and two years later the group acrimoniously disbanded.
Kirchner entered what he later described as “one of the loneliest
times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me
out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people
and cars.” It was then that he began the Berlin street series.
In retrospect it is impossible not to
read the anxious urban vision of Kirchner’s Berlin paintings in
light of the approaching war. Our knowledge of what was to come
gives them a giddy, edge-of-the-volcano excitement and a prophetic
urgency.
There is an explosive tension in the
works between male and female and between forces of disintegration
and containment. Sadly, it is the opposite of the Brücke’s holistic
vision of artistic, sexual and natural harmony.
But it is not too much of a stretch to
see the Berlin street series as a desperate, last ditch effort to
hold together, if only through the magic of metaphor, a world that
was about to be blown to smithereens.
“Kirchner and the Berlin Street” opens
Sunday and runs through Nov. 10 at the Museum of Modern Art.
By Ken Johnson
Source by NYTimes.com
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