Street scenes

Alfred and Thekla Hess, Erfurt. Hans Hess, Erfurt/Berlin/Paris (by descent from the above, circa 1933-1937). Sold under duress due to persecution by the Nazi authorities. Kölner Kunstverein, Cologne. Dr. Carl Hagemann, Frankfurt (acquired from the above, 1937). Professor Dr. Holzinger, Frankfurt (after 1945). Dr. Elisabeth Holzinger (by descent from the above). Brücke Museum, Berlin (acquired from the family of the above, 1980). Restituted to the heirs of Alfred Hess, July 2006. Berliner Strassenszene (Berlin Street-scene) is one of the finest examples of the famous series of Berlin street scenes or Strassenbilder that Kirchner painted in the years immediately before the First World War. This series of paintings, now widely recognized to be among the foremost pictorial achievements in early twentieth-century art is centered on the subject of the city's famous streetwalkers touting for business on the illuminated nocturnal streets of Berlin. Disturbingly modern, frank and provocative portraits of life in the metropolis, these paintings are the first psychological paintings of the twentieth-century to express a pervasive anxiety about modernity and man's ambiguous love/hate relationship with that new creature of an industrialized society: the city. Berlin, in the first years of the 20th Century was the fastest growing city in the world. A paradoxical shining new temple of modernity and of the ugly sprawl of industrial progress, Germany's Weltstadt was both feared and admired as a monstrous mechanical enslaver of man and as something of a cauldron of vice and corruption. The epitome of all that was modern, at night, it was the brightest city in Europe, lit up by all the latest attractions, from cafés and cabarets to cinemas, nightclubs, theatres and race-tracks. Above all, the city was known for its prostitution. The practice of streetwalking was preferred in Berlin over the more usual and discreet use of registered brothels common to other European cities. As a result of the high visibility and large number Berlin prostitutes on the city streets, the German capital soon gained the reputation of being a modern-day Sodom or Gomorrah earning itself the memorable nickname Die Hüre Babylon (The Whore of Babylon). It was these independent streetwalking women of the night that Kirchner fastened upon as icons of his age. Forming the thematic and compositional centre of his paintings these mantis-like temptresses epitomize the fear and allure of the metropolis and provoke a complex range of emotions in the viewer. A strange but mesmeric combination of gothic and primitive form, adorned in the outlandish headwear of the very latest fashion, the faces he gives these women are both attractive and frightening and seem to encapsulate the whole paradox of modern experience in a startling and unforgettable single visage. Haunting and memorable these magnificent creatures are majestic specters of the city night, their gaudy mask-like features, the Expressionist face of Berlin. In Berliner Strassenszene Kirchner presents two cocottes wandering languidly in the midst of a bustling city crowd made up of relatively anonymous bower-hatted men busy walking in a multitude of directions. Behind these two flamboyant and colorful figures a crowded number 15 tram (which ran via Hallesches Tor, Postdamerplatz and the Anhalter Bahnhof) identifies their location as being right in the heart of the city centre. Kirchner had first moved to Berlin in the autumn of 1911 where he joined fellow Brücke members Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. By early 1912 with the addition of Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, all the leading members of the Dresden-based group were living there. They were drawn to the city by the attractive opportunities it offered, but the fiercely competitive life in Berlin provoked inner rivalries and by 1913 these had led to the dissolution of the group. Somewhat alienated and alone and now questioning his identity in the face of the grea